


operation soundstage

by attheborder



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: 1960s, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Cold War, Espionage, Jealousy, M/M, Slow Burn, The Inherent Incompetence Of British Intelligence, something vaguely resembling casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27398449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: Night time was spy time; in darkness the key to every code seemed closer at hand. If only one could just step around the next corner before the harsh light of mundane day returned and the shabbiness of the sorry, striving world was again laid brightly bare, perhaps one could find the truth.London, 1964: the height of the Cold War. MI6 officer Francis Crozier is assigned to handle a new agent.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 29
Kudos: 59
Collections: Fall Fitzier Exchange





	operation soundstage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anactoriatalksback](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoriatalksback/gifts).



> the dashing, marvelous, upstanding, brilliant [anactoriatalksback](/users/anactoriatalksback) requested: “Cold War AU (or any spy AU really) where […] one of them is a spy and the other is the recruiter/handler,” and I was simply powerless to resist. 
> 
> thank you so much to the amazing mods for hosting this exchange, and thank you to [ktula](/users/ktula) for the quick beta! 
> 
> Ash: this is for you, in so many extremely specific ways. you will soon see why. godspeed.

Bound to a chair at the edge of the launchpad, poor Kitty Divine writhed uselessly, knowing that in a matter of minutes the rocket would take off and burn her to a crisp—not to mention threaten the very freedom of the West, thanks to the advanced communications equipment it housed in its sleek shaft.

She tried to catch the eye of her dear Tom, but he had eyes only for the dozen guns pointed at him, the most prominent of which was the oversized gemstone-encrusted revolver belonging to the dastardly one-eyed Clevinger.

His hands were up, but Kitty knew there was no way he would surrender.

“But what you don’t know, Clevinger,” Tom was saying, “is that I transmitted the launch codes to the British embassy an hour ago, and Mr. Peterson is at this very moment broadcasting the signals needed to reverse them!”

Clevinger laughed. “Those codes were decoys, Mr. Bowline! This rocket is taking off in sixty seconds, whether you like it or not, and then all of England’s secrets will be mine!”

“Oh, I don’t mean _your_ codes. Heaven forbid!” Tom let out a rich, easy laugh. “I mean the codes your man Draznin handed over to me, the very second I cornered him during the gala, and twisted his arm behind his back!”

“But how could you have done such a thing! You were tied up in my underground prison during the party!”

“That was not me,” said Tom. “I’d been swapped out hours before for a doppelganger.” He raised an eyebrow. “And I wasn’t the only one. How about that?”

In a single fluid movement, the henchmen lined up behind Clevinger took off their helmets, revealing not the handsome faces of Clevinger’s harem of hardened Soviets but instead the clean and pink-cheeked countenances of Kitty’s own crack squad of lady acrobats.

“My men! What have you done with my wonderful men?” howled Clevinger.

“Get him, girls!” commanded Tom. Two of the nearest ladies stepped forward and clapped strong, capable hands around Clevinger’s soft arms. His revolver clattered uselessly to the ground, and Tom swooped forward to pick it up, giving it an expert spin before stowing it safely inside his jacket.

He darted to Kitty’s side and loosed her bonds, pulling her up to her high-heeled feet. She swooned. “Oh, Tom!” she cried, clinging to him passionately.

“That’s my name,” said the spy. “And doesn’t it just sound better when you’re the one saying it?”

“I’ll say it as many times as you like.”

“I think I have a better idea,” Tom said, and kissed her, backed by the glow of the floodlights through the clouds of steam from the cooling rocket engines.

And the credits rolled:

_TOM BOWLINE WILL RETURN NEXT YEAR IN:_

_ICE BLINK_

***

The coffee, thought Francis, was a Soviet plot.

Surely there was no explanation for the weak, soapy brew, inescapable inside the walls of MI6, other than a devious scheme by the Reds. Why bother with infiltration and misinformation when you could simply sabotage the caffeine delivery system, and watch British intelligence collapse from the inside?

He felt wretched and the coffee was doing the opposite of helping; he would be capable of accomplishing very little today. This was how England would be brought to her knees. The fucking bastards.

“How was your weekend?”

It took a moment for Francis to realize that Sir John was talking to him. He tore his gaze from the oily film of his possibly-Communist coffee and pointed it towards his genial controller.

“Fine,” he said. “Blanky and I saw a film.”

They were standing about in the corridor, waiting for their full complement to arrive before taking the lift up to the fifth floor for their briefing. It was one of Sir John’s little insistences, these little “team moments” that were meant to shore up their sense of camaraderie before a wrench was thrown into the mix, courtesy of some new initiative from the Chief.

“How did you find it?” Sir John asked.

“Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. Don’t you agree, Thomas?”

“Fun,” said Blanky, “but yeah. Rubbish.”

Francis could’ve easily let the subject drop there, gone on to ask Sir John how _his_ weekend was. It would have been the polite thing to do, and Sir John likely expected it, but Francis was certain that he couldn’t handle news of Sophia this early on a Monday, so instead, he went on. “The whole plot was utterly inane. No communications satellite, ours or theirs, has that kind of surveillance capability. Ridiculous! And the villain was sheer caricature. His motivations were unintelligible—”

Footsteps were approaching their little group—probably McDonald, finally, having just returned from some surveillance or drop; for an officer he certainly found reason to be out in the field often, and was always showing up late in a manner Francis had to admit was very accomplished and dashing.

“—and that actor, that Fitzjames, I couldn’t stand him. Flopping about the screen like a cartoon. Marble-mouthed and hardly convincing as an actor, let alone a secret agent. Honestly, it’s films like that which make us look like a bunch of flamboyant lunatics, instead of a respectable agency. It’s no wonder Moscow can’t take us seriously, not when we’re represented by clowns like that on the international stage—”

Someone cleared their throat. Francis turned—and gaped.

As if summoned like the very devil himself, Tom Bowline stood in front of him. In the flesh.

He looked at once nothing and everything like the man on the screen. Tall, yes, but less wide; compressed somehow. His dark hair was oiled to perfection and his suit was impeccably tailored, complete with a checked pocket square in navy and magenta, a fair bit more stylish than anything he’d worn in the film. Unlike his character, he wore glasses—horn rimmed and quite flattering, a far cry from the dowdy National Health spectacles that most men in the office wore, Francis included.

“Francis, meet James Fitzjames,” said Sir John, in his most diplomatic tone—which, given his position, was a substantially powerful one. “I believe you know him from… the cinema.”

Francis caught Blanky’s eye, trying desperately to communicate the need for some bloody help, please, if you would. But Blanky only smiled one of his wicked smiles. _Oh, you’ve gotten yourself in it now, haven’t you?_ it said plainly, along with a healthy side helping of _and I’m not going to lift a finger._

Francis stiffly extended a hand, which Fitzjames took with perhaps more enthusiasm than was warranted.

“Francis Crozier.”

“A pleasure,” said Fitzjames. His voice was polished, precise: unarguably a movie star voice.

“Let me guess,” said Francis, icily. He had an idea that if he ramped up the animosity now, it would save him from seeming like a fool who would denounce the man in private and simper in public. He would far rather be seen by Fitzjames as standoffish than sycophantic. “You’re here to do some research for your next picture, eh?”

“One step ahead of us as always, Francis,” said Sir John, pre-empting whatever Fitzjames was about to say with his thin slash of a mouth. “Exactly correct. I’ll tell you gentlemen all about it upstairs—”

That was when McDonald arrived, begging his apologies: he’d been caught up in the City, traffic was hell. Francis scoffed inwardly. Their party now complete, a silent and tense lift ride preceded entry to the dim and dull meeting room where Francis had of late spent many an hour wishing for the sweet release of a glass of something brown.

“It’s an honor, Mr. Fitzjames,” said McDonald, dimpling in an enthusiastic smile as he sat. “I’ve always been an admirer of your work. That French film you did, when was it, ‘57? Tremendous stuff.”

Fitzjames accepted the compliment with an almost parodic air of modesty. It was gut-churning. And the way he sat! Chair tilted at an angle so he could spread those ungainly legs wide, elbow leaning on the table as he gesticulated, telling a story from the recent premiere for _The Jeweled Gun_ where he’d leapt in front of an unbalanced waiter in order to protect a starlet in a white dress from a great deluge of red wine, and had gone around afterwards in a soaked shirt proclaiming it to be the newest fashion.

Sir John passed out briefing packets which Francis, Blanky, and McDonald duly opened and scanned through. All the paperwork had been done, and all the proper signoffs had been given, from Sir John to the Chief all the way up to the Foreign Secretary, in order to give Fitzjames a low level of civilian clearance.

Even that, Francis thought, was going too far. But it was necessary for the operation at hand: over the course of the next two weeks, and before Fitzjames went off to Finland to film his next Tom Bowline picture, the officers at the table were to take him round in turns to meet a list of pre-approved contacts within the building, to whom he could ask a list of pre-approved questions regarding intelligence work and its processes.

It was an awful lot of hoops to jump through for an awfully small amount of benefit, but Fitzjames, apparently, was determined to “bring verisimilitude and gravity to his performance as Britain’s iconic superspy.”

At this, Francis had to hold back a laugh, covering it up with an ostentatious sip of watery coffee before letting out a loud sigh and drumming his fingers on the table. “If it’s gravity you’re looking for,” he said, “why don’t you walk into the Soviet Embassy and shout ‘death to Communism!’ That’d make for a capital story.”

McDonald sipped his tea, carefully neutral. Blanky let out a noise half-way between a cough and a barking laugh.

Fitzjames’s mouth twitched. “I really appreciate this,” he said, looking to Sir John. “I think it’ll be a tremendous amount of fun.”

***

“Sir John would like to see you in his office before you go home, sir,” said Jopson. In his mustard polo-neck and mod black blazer he looked so young and svelte that Francis felt like one of the ancient, hunch-backed gargoyles on the roof of Westminster in comparison. He sometimes seriously considered ordering the boy to start coming to work in a burlap sack, for the sake of his own sanity.

“Did he say why?” Francis asked. He was just about to begin preparing to leave for the evening. If it was more to do with that toff Fitzjames, Francis had half a mind to ask Jopson to tell Sir John he’d gone home hours ago, despite the fact that Sir John knew Francis’s habits and wouldn’t believe that lie for a damned second.

Jopson blinked innocently. “Couldn’t say, sir. Seemed quite important, though.”

“Right,” said Francis, “of course.” He hauled himself out of his creaking desk chair and shuffled across the wide second-floor atrium towards Sir John’s red-doored private office.

Century House, MI6’s brand-new base of operations, still smelled strongly of paint and plaster—it made moving about the place feel like visiting a building site, or a very posh museum. Francis missed the old Broadway headquarters something fierce: he missed the creaking lift, the grimy windows, the plaque on the facade that identified it as the offices of a fire-extinguisher company. He missed the late nights with Ross in the dank debrief rooms down in the basement, him just returned from Vienna or Hamburg or Prague, Francis suffused with relief and pride at the gems of intelligence his prized agent had been able to bring back, the tape in the machine running out as their discussion ran far afield from work: discussing music, literature, women. Sometimes men, even—this had been before Ann, of course.

“What’s this about, Sir John?”

“Sit down, Francis.”

Francis reluctantly did so. From a drawer in his desk, Sir John pulled out a dossier, and handed it over.

In many ways it was the twin of the one he’d received at the briefing earlier: a glossy photograph of James Fitzjames clipped to the packet, and a brief spread of biographical details heading up the top sheet. But that was where the similarities began and ended.

“You can’t be serious,” said Francis, after he’d flipped through the pages, and then once again to be absolutely sure he wasn’t hallucinating.

“I am very serious.”

Francis looked down again at the letters in black block print, reading OPERATION SOUNDSTAGE.

“Fitzjames? James Fitzjames, a _spy?_ Sir John, he is an entertainer.”

“So was Mata Hari.”

 _She was executed,_ Francis didn’t say. _She made a career out of showing her fanny,_ he also did not say. “Be as that may,” he said, “from what I know of him, he is—a dilettante, a dandy! An airhead! I cannot imagine that bringing him into the fold—even for a short time, and with the proper clearances—could do anything but endanger the security of our men. He has little respect for the seriousness of our profession. With all due respect, this is a bad decision, Sir John.”

“I appreciate your candor, as always. But it’s not my decision to make,” said Sir John, shaking his head. “This comes straight from the top.”

“Barrow?” exclaimed Francis. The Chief of MI6 had been in his lofty position for so long that the joke went that when he finally went on to that great debriefing room in the sky, his body would have to be removed from its habitual seat in his throne-like office chair with a crowbar.

“Apparently their sons are school friends, of some great acquaintance,” said Sir John.

“Naturally,” muttered Francis. Eton, he presumed. It had been some years since the days when MI6 had been composed in its entirety of such men, but the proportion of them taking up top-level positions in the myriad departments of the organization was still, in Francis’s mind, frustratingly high. “And—I’m to be assigned as his officer?”

“You worked wonders with Ross. With him retired, and Little laying low in Berlin there’s simply not much for you to do. I hate to see your considerable skill go to waste. You’ve been at loose ends, Francis.”

“There’s Hodgson,” tried Francis. “He’s very prolific in his reports—I really think he might be onto something in Zagreb, it’s worth putting some more men onto—”

Sir John shook his head, spreading his hands out on the table. “This is an incredible chance to secure a direct line into the upper echelons of the entertainment industry. His circle is filled with internationals—French, Americans, Germans. Rich producers, film stars and their wives and their mistresses—imagine getting him into Moscow! It’s the perfect cover. Nobody would suspect a man famous for playing a spy to actually _be_ a spy. Don’t you think? When Barrow proposed it to me, I thought it the finest idea I’d heard in some time. My only question was when he could start!”

Francis wanted to argue more. Well, no: really, it was more that he _ought_ to want to argue more. In fact, all he actually wanted to do was go home, put on some records, and drink until he fell asleep. So he gave up, knowing it wouldn’t be long before he hated himself for it.

“If you think it best, Sir John,” he demurred.

Sir John beamed. Damn the man—when he smiled, Francis understood how he’d gotten to where he was. If Francis had even a quarter of Sir John’s ability to inspire loyalty in his men, why, he’d have been promoted to controller years ago, with his own office looking out over the Thames and a crack team of officers to direct to every corner of the globe. Instead he was relegated to desk-work plus a passel of active and inactive agents in third-tier cities, for whom the return on investment was limited to blurry telephoto captures and half-incoherent cipher keys.

“You’ll meet with him directly on Thursday, under cover of Operation Premiere,” said Sir John, referencing the earlier decoy debriefing. “Familiarize yourself with his career and his circle. No one outside of the authorized personnel listed there is to know of his true purpose in visiting. When he goes off to Finland, you will operate him as an agent on the ground for the duration.”

Francis nodded his way dully through this, and then asked, “And after the filming is over? I’ll still be stuck with him?”

“We will evaluate,” said Sir John, an emphatically ambiguous statement. “And Francis,” he added, “I mean this as a friend: you’ve been looking rather ragged lately. I am sorry things didn’t work out with Sophia—there is no one more sorry than I—” (Francis found this hard to believe) “—but surely there is no need to mope! Not when the city is full of beautiful women who dream of getting to know a man like you, working hard to preserve their freedoms. What you need is someone to come home to.”

Easy for Sir John to say. He’d married his secretary Jane, nee Griffin, who’d had a reputation during the war for being sharper than many a controller, and stunning to boot. Though she now kept house for Sir John, it was said in the department that against official protocol, but in keeping with unofficial tradition, she knew everything that went on in her husband’s job, and in fact was the invisible hand behind many of his most successful operations.

Such a partnership wasn’t exactly an option for Francis—though the impossibility of it didn’t stop him from imagining, on particularly bad days, what Jopson would look like in a Chanel wedding dress—and the prospect of putting himself up for public viewing like a slab of steak at the meat market was so unappealing as to be similarly unviable.

“I appreciate your concern, Sir John. But I’m doing just fine on my own,” he lied.

“Well. I’m glad to hear it.” He seemed unconvinced, but that wasn’t Francis’s problem.

***

Thursday dawned drizzly and gray like every other morning of Francis’s life that he could remember. At some point, he often thought, the sky must be blue—something to do with the laws of probability—but when he tried to call any specific memories of such a time to mind, he found that he could not.

He had spent the last night—well, perhaps the last two or three days—collecting up every magazine and tabloid he could find and combing through them for information on his new recruit.

According to this intelligence, James Fitzjames had starred in three Tom Bowline pictures in as many years. _The Jeweled Gun_ was the most recent of the three, and was raking in the highest box-office returns of the year so far. In every interview, he spun elaborate yarns, charmed his interlocutor, and never forgot to leave off without mentioning his appreciation for the hard-working men and women behind the scenes who made the whole thing possible.

From what Francis could discern, Fitzjames’ perpetual eligible bachelorhood was the engine that fueled a good three-quarters of the British celebrity press. Over the last year alone, he’d been connected with a blonde starlet, a blonde heiress, and, just to spice things up, a blonde hairdresser whom he’d apparently met at the races.

Fitzjames was, by all accounts, a _lovely_ man. Nobody who met him ever had a bad word to say about him, excepting that he was simply _too_ good in bed, perhaps, or that he was _too_ talented an actor. His best friend, a dissolute dilettante with the godforsaken nickname of “Dundy” who starred in second-rate matinee comedies, was likewise well-loved, and even more given to public displays of extravagance: dragging Fitzjames along on raucous tours of Europe, rumors and affairs piling up in their wake.

All of this led Francis to the irrefutable conclusion that running Fitzjames as an agent on the ground, here or in Finland or anywhere on God’s green earth, would be nothing less than disastrous. A man with such a degree of complicated personal entanglements, not to mention the thirst for publicity and acclaim, was subject to all sorts of weaknesses. Easily distracted, and easily compromised.

It was a terrible idea! And the most terrible thing about it was that he couldn’t think of a way out. Sir John seemed to be completely blind to the manifest possibilities of failure that loomed like great icebergs on the horizon.

With all of this weighing heavily on his mind, Francis met Fitzjames in the second-floor foyer of Century House after engaging in a purely nonverbal standoff with Jopson five minutes prior. He’d thought for a moment he would emerge victorious, but Jopson’s terrifyingly clear gaze had won out in the end, carrying with it the implication of the world of pain he’d be in for if he didn’t carry out his orders as promised to Sir John.

“Mr. Fitzjames,” Francis said.

“Mr. Crozier.”

They stared at each other. Francis felt the urge to slam his fist on a table rising, which did not bode well this early in an encounter. Usually he didn’t start to feel it until he was actually physically seated at a table.

Francis set off towards their first stop on the tour at a quick clip, not even bothering to nod to Fitzjames or give him a perfunctory _come along now._ This led to Fitzjames, who had been staring at the war-era photographs lining the wall near the lift with an awed look, having to jog to catch up with him.

“You know, when I was in Malta, we had a weapons specialist on set who said he’d done work for you lot during the war. He said it was great fun, running around with the rebels in the woods, ferrying defectors over the border and suchlike. This was the chap who was supposed to teach me sword-fighting, but in the end I took to it altogether too easily, so by the time the cameras rolled he had moved on to teaching me how to fire a matchlock musket, which was blasted difficult. This was when I was shooting _On The Ganges,_ ” he added. “Have you seen it?”

“Can’t remember,” said Francis, who had.

To any outside observer, they would have looked exactly as Sir John meant them to appear: a perpetually desk-bound officer reduced to public relations work, and a visiting celebrity on tour just as countless ministers, lords, visiting dignitaries from allied nations, and, in one interesting case, an elite test cricket champion, had been before him.

But the whole time, as Francis answered dull questions about various elements of their operation, he was sizing Fitzjames up, toe to tip, through narrowed eyes. Every inch of the man seemed to confirm Francis’s worst fears.

Those big hands were awfully clumsy. His hair looked terribly high-maintenance. And he was so recognizable! Sure, it wasn’t as if he were to be run as a covert man, but still—Sir John’s emphatic belief that his notoriety was a pro rather than a con seemed more unlikely with every passing minute, and every giggling whisper and glance that dogged Fitzjames as he strode purposefully around the corridors.

Francis's portion of the orientation complete, he was left with half an hour yet before he was due to hand his burden over to Blanky for the afternoon. He had things to attend to, but he couldn’t exactly leave Fitzjames wandering the halls by himself until then, and he certainly wasn’t about to lead him over to his desk and have him watch with those keen eyes as Francis went about the boring business of national security.

“Ah, Mr. Goodsir!” said Francis, seizing upon the appearance of a young man in a rumpled corduroy blazer and knit tie, who always seemed to be looking out his thick spectacles at a completely separate world than the rest of their sorry lot—a world full of wonder and fascination, possibilities and joy.

Goodsir turned to greet Francis and then stopped, his mouth hanging open, staring at the taller, sleeker, far more fashionable man beside him.

“You received the brief? Operation Premiere?” Francis asked. “Mr. Fitzjames here is doing research for his new film.”

Goodsir’s starry-eyed expression was undisrupted by his nod of confirmation. “Yes, I know,” he breathed. “I didn’t realize he’d be… _here…_ wow, Mr. Fitzjames. I’m a—I really—wow.”

“Goodsir here is in research and development,” Francis said to Fitzjames.

“Oh, marvelous!” said Fitzjames. “So you make all of the little gadgets, do you? Pen-bombs and shoe-trackers and guns inside cigarette cases?”

“Er,” said Goodsir. “It’s mostly a lot of maths. Some mechanical engineering…. radio stuff, occasionally.”

Fitzjames blinked, and then his gracious expression reinstalled itself seamlessly on that cinderblock of a face. “You know, I did a film once in America where the sound equipment was troubled with constant intrusions from a Mexican preacher, broadcasting from south of the border. It served as quite the entertainment.”

“Oh! An interference issue! You know, signal jamming is one of my specialties… have you heard of the principle of twilight immunity? It’s when atmospheric conditions affect jamming signals, allowing certain broadcasts to penetrate…”

Perfect. An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object: they could chatter away at each other for hours without exchanging the slightest bit of actual valuable information. Francis deftly extracted himself from the conversation, and headed for the accursed coffeepot. He found McDonald there, stirring an immense amount of sugar into his mug.

“Rough morning?” asked McDonald, upon seeing Francis’s hunched posture and grim expression.

“Don’t even ask,” said Francis, and then, without pausing to allow McDonald the opportunity to disobey, went on, “That idiot Fitzjames thinks this is a game.”

McDonald shrugged. The man’s cheerful neutrality was equal parts infuriating and inspiring. For the ten years Francis had known him, he’d seemed to effortlessly ride above the waves of the Cold War on a cloud of perpetual good spirits. Perhaps it was the Scottishness, although if Francis thought about it none of the other Scots he knew had such capacity for optimism: in fact one of Francis’s former agents, an Edinburgh man, had been so affected by his experiences in the Baltics that he’d fled to Australia to become a sheep farmer for three years before joining back up. “Could be worse,” McDonald said.

“How so?”

“Well, you could be dealing with a drop site in Prague that’s apparently been compromised for weeks." He punctuated this with a sigh.

“Really?” said Francis. “Christ, that’s a mess—how do you know it was blown?”

McDonald thumbed his nose, and winked.

“Ah, naturally,” said Francis. “Your source.” McDonald’s semi-unauthorized fieldwork was able to proceed unfettered on account of how it led to at least one major intelligence breakthrough each year—badly needed victories for the department. He had managed to secure a source, someone high up inside the other side’s London outpost—unnamed, naturally, for security reasons, but consistent in delivering a steady drip of valuable and, more importantly, verifiable information.

“And it’s not the only one,” McDonald said, in a casual tone nevertheless weighted with genuine distress. “I think there are two more, at least, that are under suspicion. Luckily nothing of high priority has passed through any of them recently, but now I’ve got to deal with finding new ones, and then the rigamarole of re-establishing procedure around them…”

“This is sound?” Francis asked. “Your information. You trust your source on this? If you’re being given the run-around… it could be a misdirection.”

“Of course I trust them,” said McDonald. “It’s a good thing I found out when I did. Peddie was just days away from dropping a new canister—on hold now, of course. We might have to send a man in…” He trailed off, looking pensive.

“Well,” said Francis. “I suppose it is. A good thing you found out, I mean. Sir John will be happy.”

“Yes, I rather think he will be. Not that he needs it,” McDonald said, “he’s well cheered enough by giving Mr. Fitzjames the run of the place, eh?”

Francis sighed. McDonald and he had much in common—they’d both been in Hungary together, which of all of Francis’s postings had been the most frustrating, but also had lent him the most success of his career to date, not to mention a lasting fondness for goulash—and the impulse to share the true nature of his dealings with Fitzjames tugged at him. It would be useful—satisfying, even—to engage in a bit of commiseration, a time-honored pastime of the service. But there was nobody in the department, besides Francis and Sir John, with the necessary clearance. Not even Blanky could know. Jopson knew, of course, but he didn’t count, as he knew everything, even (especially) the things he ought not to have known, and besides, Francis couldn’t _talk_ to him, not really.

There was really nothing for it. Francis had lingered now by the coffee long enough to begin worrying about the state of Goodsir’s heart in Fitzjames’s presence, so he nodded goodbye to McDonald, headed back to where he’d left them and proceeded to guide Fitzjames to Blanky’s desk, ten minutes early.

He exchanged a look with Blanky, laden with meaning as their looks tended to be. _He’s your problem now,_ Francis’s glance said, assuming that Blanky’s returning expression encompassed, _Right, I’ll take care of it._

But as he walked away, he realized it might have instead meant _can’t handle him, can you?_

***

On his way home from the office that evening, Francis passed a billboard going up on the side of the road. Waiting at a red light in his Citroen as the men up on ladders pasted the thing into place, he watched as a familiar smirking face, ten feet tall, unrolled itself before his eyes. One outsized hand rested elegantly at a square chin, while the other held a shining glass.

 _The handsomest man in England drinks Haig whisky,_ said the refined serif typeface, _and his name is James Fitzjames._

Francis resolved then and there to quit drinking.

***

There was the matter of training. Per orders, Fitzjames was supposed to receive standard MI6 security and communications training for intelligence agents before he headed off to Finland.

Francis hadn’t trained a new agent since Edward Little. Only six years ago and yet worlds away: he’d been running Ross in Belgrade then, riding high on the successful infiltration of an East German military base. Little had been young and eager, straight from the Navy, with a keen eye for detail and an endearing dedication to his cuff-link collection. He was very willing to follow orders, and had taken to logistics and transport like a duck to water. It had been smooth sailing, at least until Little was on the ground—Francis had then had the misfortune of understanding that when it came to fieldwork, the man’s fondness for following direction could be a curse just as often as it was a blessing, as Little had a tendency to freeze up when conditions changed, rather than make decisions on his own.

This was different. Unlike Little, Fitzjames was prone to asking questions, trying to parse out the reasoning for every choice, the design behind every step of the process. He wanted to know why he wasn’t being trained in weapons handling and unarmed combat— “I’ve done plenty of the stuff for films, of course, but it’s hardly the same, is it?”—and Francis had needed to explain that unlike his character Bowline, with all of his secret identities, Fitzjames himself could of course never be run as a covert agent.

“Your work will be more clerical than anything, I’m sorry to say,” Francis told him, “the passive gathering and transmission of intelligence only,” though he wasn’t sorry at all, and indeed felt a frisson of satisfaction at Fitzjames’s look of disappointment.

The clearance Francis requested finally went through for Mr. Goodsir to join Operation Soundstage, which came as a relief. He’d been worried up to that point that he’d have to be the one instructing Fitzjames in all the little fiddly bits of communications, the hardware setups and the encoding techniques.

Luckily, Goodsir was more than happy—overjoyed, even—to sit with Fitzjames and walk him through the intricacies of the teletype machine, and the portable radio frequency-switching he would need to do should his access to the local bureau be limited.

The more operational training was left to Francis. They reviewed protocol for drop sites, handoffs, phone calls on monitored lines. He taught Fitzjames, reluctantly, the code words and phrases to be used when meeting potential contacts. He spent a full afternoon on teaching Fitzjames how to use the microminiature Minox camera, which was the size of a wafer and could be hidden up a sleeve or inside a hat-brim. Francis was unduly satisfied to see Fitzjames struggle at first with such a simple, mechanical task; the joy was short-lived, for he quickly picked up the technique, and soon was shooting accurate pictures at high speed. That didn’t mean anything, though. Many an agent had breezed through training only to prove summarily incompetent in the field, as Francis knew only too well.

Normally, they would have been doing all of this at a rented flat, or some rambling house in Chiswick or Hampstead where they could’ve gone over everything in secluded peace and quiet. But Fitzjames’s “film research” provided the opportune cover for him to be coming into headquarters as needed, which saved money and therefore made Accounts very happy, so there was no way around it. And Francis, truthfully, was grateful he didn’t have to hole up off in some suburb for weeks, taking tea and supper with Fitzjames, being forced into long camaraderie-building walks around the neighborhood, having to share a toilet, and such.

It was, in fact, a relief to be able to retreat to his desk for lunch, to dive into his _real_ work, the stuff that was keeping the world turning: miles distant from the frustrating exercise of pointless patronage that was this whole teaching-James-Fitzjames-how-to-spy business.

He was preparing for another one of these noontime exoduses when Fitzjames cleared his throat, taking out something from the expensive leather bag at his feet.

“New pages for _Ice Blink,”_ he said. “Just came in this morning.” The pages were printed out on pink copy paper, standing out in the brass-bound packet of white A4. “They’ve rewritten one of the scenes between Tom and Teresa…. the girl. There’s always a girl. Well, in this one there’s two.”

“I see,” said Francis. The door was very close...if he could just slip out…

“Here, can you—?” Fitzjames said.

Francis found himself suddenly with the pink pages in hand. He protested, “No, listen, I can’t—”

“Of course you can.”

Before Francis could toss the pages down on the table, get up and stalk back to his desk, Fitzjames read out, in the familiar, suave tone of Tom Bowline: “Haven’t you any idea of who you’re working for?”

The next line on the pink page swam beneath Francis’s eyes. He could have very easily answered, _I’m not doing this,_ or even a snappish, _keep your dreck to the set and out of the department._

Fitzjames wasn’t looking at his script. He was staring up at Francis; his face had taken on the aspect of his character. He looked at once very serious and entirely at ease—like the whole world and all its dangers was meant only for him to master, and he would—at his own pace, and in due time.

Francis cleared his throat and read, “Of course I know. I think the question you’re looking for is, do I care?” The line, meant for whatever slim ingenue had been cast in the role, sounded horrible and stilted in Francis’s brogue. But he didn’t put the script down.

“Oh, that’s all right then,” answered Fitzjames-as-Bowline.

“It is?”

“Naturally, someone as beautiful as you shouldn’t be held to the same moral standard as others.”

Francis’s voice wavered slightly, but he carried on: “Why did you come here? I am dangerous to know, Mr. Bowline.”

“The only people worth knowing are.”

“Does that include you? Trouble follows you, wherever you go, or so I’ve heard.”

“I think you’ll find that I’m the one that follows trouble. And you’re exactly the kind I’ve been looking for.”

“I must tell you—the Bear knows you’re here. He is a powerful man. He’ll come to find you.”

“Let him come, darling.”

They stared at each other for a hot, weighted moment, until, at nearly the same time, they turned away.

“Well, it’s not exactly Shakespeare,” said Fitzjames, rifling through the rest of the changes, “but it’ll do in a pinch, I suppose.”

Francis returned to his desk with his ears burning. The dialogue rang in his head. It was absolutely meaningless pap—people bought tickets to look at the beautiful faces, huge, on a screen, not hear great words spoken—and yet, all the same, it had affected him.

Fitzjames hadn’t been like that in the film, had he? Francis only remembered the sound of guns—echoing unrealistically, a nine-millimeter sounded nothing like that when fired inside a hangar—the Technicolor costumes—the schlocky orchestral score—nothing in the way of stirring performances.

Perhaps he would have to go see the film again. Just to make sure his opinion of it had been correct the first time.

***

The day before Fitzjames was due in Finland, he appeared at Francis' desk late in the morning holding a brown paper bag and a paper coffee cup.

“What is this?”

“Croissant,” said Fitzjames, “and coffee. Thought you could use it. You always look rather tired.”

“We have coffee here.”

“Yes, but it’s awful,” said Fitzjames. “Haven’t you tried it? This is the good stuff, Ethiopian, there’s this little place I passed on the way in…”

Francis knew the place he was talking about; he’d driven by it every day since the move to the new headquarters. He would’ve thought Fitzjames got dropped off in a shiny Bentley, or however it was celebrities got around the city during winter, but he must have walked from the Tube, or parked and then walked all the way back to the cafe.

Frowning as he considered this, he took the paper bag and cup from Fitzjames, and placed them down on his desk.

“Shall we—?” Fitzjames asked, nodding his head down the hall.

“No,” Francis said. “I actually have to be off. Taking a meeting at Whitehall. Oversight, you see—the usual drudgery. I’m going to give you something to do in the meantime. It’s an easy job.”

Fitzjames’s face fell. “So—we aren’t training?”

“No. Not with me. You’re with Mr. Goodsir at half past three for your final comms review.”

“Well, why didn’t anyone bloody tell me? I had to put off a meeting with my manager for this—!”

“I didn’t say you didn’t have anything to do, did I?” From inside a desk drawer Francis drew a small black canister and held it up. “This needs to be placed at the King’s Head dead drop. Follow the protocol from the training. Do you remember?”

Fitzjames looked terrified for a moment. Then, excitedly: “Yes, of course. Absolutely, I remember.”

They took the lift down to the lobby. Fitzjames asked, apropos of nothing, “So you were in the war? Where were you stationed?”

“That’s classified.”

“What about afterwards? George—Barrow, that is, he said a lot of folks spun off to MI5 or the Foreign Office before coming back—”

“Classified.”

Fitzjames looked pained. “Can you tell me anything about…. anything you’ve done?”

“I was in Hungary,” said Francis shortly. “Working out of the Budapest office, ten years ago.”

“Oh.” Fitzjames frowned. It seemed he didn’t have any thrilling tales at hand regarding Hungary, or even any that were mildly adjacent. This satisfied Francis deeply. For his part, he had no interest in offering up details of his life for Fitzjames to reappropriate. He refused to become “this man I once met, a secret agent, a _real_ one, no word of a lie, who spent three days in a dank tunnel underneath Rottenbiller listening to tapped phone lines in order to discern the truth behind rumors of troops moving at the border, with rats crawling over his toes, and mold getting into his lungs…” in one of Fitzjames’s long-winded parlor stories.

The relationship between an officer and an agent was necessarily a close one—the closest. When a recruited agent found himself forbidden from discussing the most intense and real elements of his new life with anyone, including his wife, he naturally turned to his commanding officer for the emotional succor that such a high-stakes lifestyle required. But Francis had no intention of entering into Fitzjames's confidence, or allowing him to force his way into Francis’s own. With any luck, this commitment would end in Fitzjames being dismissed from MI6’s services once Sir John and the Chief realized his utter lack of fitness for the position, and Francis would be happy to have escaped the experiment unscathed.

Francis and Fitzjames emerged onto Westminster Bridge Road exactly at the moment a bus was going past with an advertisement for _The Jeweled Gun_ pasted onto its side.

“Christ,” Fitzjames muttered, “they’ve made my forehead look enormous, haven’t they.”

Francis began to laugh—it was only when he turned to Fitzjames and saw the genuine distress distorting those handsome features that he fell silent. “Right,” he said, awkwardly. “Off with you, then.” Fitzjames nodded, vibrating with restrained excitement, and they went their separate ways.

Less than a minute later, Francis was turning on his heel in order to follow Fitzjames as he made his way towards the target.

Rush hour had passed, but the pavement was still filled with the men and women of London, hatted and coated and heading off with great purposeful strides towards all corners, not knowing that the gray edifice looming close by was the home of the country’s bulwark against nuclear annihilation.

Curiously, nobody at all seemed to notice the movie star striding in their midst. It was as if by the application of a pair of glasses, a knitted scarf, and a bulky tweed coat, he had become someone else entirely. But there was more to it than the clothes—something about his posture, perhaps, the way he held himself—Francis couldn’t quite understand it. He nearly wanted to shout, _Don’t you see him? Why aren’t you looking at him?_

When Fitzjames took a wrong turn down Frazier Street, Francis smiled. The man hadn’t even bothered consulting his A-Z, and had instead headed for a place he thought he knew well. But there were two pubs by similar names in the neighborhood—one, Kings Head, and the other, The King’s Head. The latter was the one identified on Fitzjames’s list of drop locations; his overconfidence had led him towards the former.

Francis stationed himself conspicuously at the entrance. When Fitzjames emerged, he spotted Francis immediately, drawing himself up short. “What are you doing here?”

Francis pointed at the sign. “Wrong place.”

“What?!” exclaimed Fitzjames, but Francis had already walked inside to retrieve the misplaced canister; when he came out again with it in hand, Fitzjames was waiting for him, with an astonished look.

“Wrong place,” Francis repeated. “You have to double and triple-check your instructions when you receive them, alongside your maps and forms. What if someone had gotten in there before you did, and taken it?”

“Well, they didn’t, so I don’t know why you—” Fitzjames broke off, seeming to realize something. “If you were following me the whole time, why didn’t you tell me to go the other way?”

“I thought you would figure it out eventually. Apparently not.” Francis couldn’t keep the smugness out of his voice.

“It was a setup!” Fitzjames exclaimed. “Wasn’t it?” When he received no answer—just Francis’s contemptuous glare—his face went slack, and then hardened. “You don’t think I can do it,” he said, disbelieving. “You don’t think I have what it takes, and you wanted to prove it however you could, even if it meant endangering your own job while you did it.”

Francis had to restrain a smile; he did not think it would benefit this discussion to let what Blanky called his “goblin look” take over his face. Instead, he said through gritted teeth, “Of course I don’t believe you can do it. You’re a privileged fool who thinks you’re qualified to wage this war on the basis of your birth and your fame. You’re loose-lipped, frivolous, and vain—you’re as much a threat to the security of Britain as any Red—”

“Do you not believe in the cause, Francis?” Fitzjames said, squaring his shoulders. “Are you so embittered that you think the only motivation one could have for wanting to serve one’s country is—is vanity?”

“Of course not,” said Francis, “there are other reasons—but none of them are yours, except that one.”

Fitzjames groaned, “It was a mistake, a simple mistake—surely you must have made them, in your time, when you were just starting out, surely you—”

“I wasn’t _allowed_ to make mistakes,” said Francis, his voice almost a growl. “It was the _war,_ Fitzjames, you don’t understand, and you never will.”

“I understand plenty,” said Fitzjames. “All I want is to do my duty—”

“We’re playing second fiddle to the KGB and the CIA,” he said bitterly. “It’s only people like you and your _ridiculous_ films that keep us alive in the eyes of the world! Reduced to cliche—to farce, to explosions and lasers and—and impossible satellites, dreamed up by a posse of Hollywood hopefuls! Well, it isn’t like that, Mister Bowline, and it never was.”

“I know it isn’t,” said Fitzjames. “Clearly not. Not if it’s men like you who are running the show.” His eyes were blazing. The lines on his face had drawn taut and quivering. For a moment Francis thought he would take a swing—but his hand remained balled up in a leather-gloved fist at his side.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Francis spat.

“Don’t I? I’ve seen enough, I think! Suffering through my training—like it’s a punishment, for you—of course, it’s just my luck to have been assigned to the only officer in the service who’s remained at his post out of sheer inertia. You’d be better off put to pasture, only you’re so heavy with secrets they can’t chance letting you go!”

“I’ll not hear this disrespect—”

“You want respect? Well, earn it.”

And then he was gone—disappearing into the crowd on the pavement, just another lanky Londoner in a finely cut coat and dark hat.

Francis remained. He felt cut—deeply so. Fitzjames had let the accusations fly with such vehemence: a seriousness Francis had not known him capable of. This tugged at something inside Francis, but he gave it no slack. It would not do to be weak in this regard. He was still an officer, after all.

It started to snow as he walked back to headquarters. He shoved his hands in his pockets, and his right hand curled around the canister, which did not hold anything at all inside.

***

In a back booth in a smoky pub in Southwark, there was a man sitting in the shadows, waiting for someone to arrive. He had been waiting for some time. “He’s late,” muttered the man, to nobody in particular.

The someone in question eventually showed up, sliding into the seat across from his contact with a smile.

“Would it kill you to be on time, ever?” said the man in the shadows.

“Might do,” said Alexander McDonald. He waved a hand and a few moments later had his preferred pint in hand. He drank deeply before taking out a slim, well-loved silver cigarette case.

The man in the shadows—who, it must be said, wore the shadows incredibly well, as if they were the latest cut of Savile Row suit—reached an arm out of the darkness to light McDonald’s cigarette with a flick of his lighter and said, “I hate this place, you know.”

“Can’t understand why,” said McDonald. “The atmosphere is simply intoxicating. And nobody can hear us over the din.”

“I reliably emerge smelling like an ashtray something died in.”

“You can always write off the dry-cleaning expenses… unless they’re keeping you on that tight a leash?”

The man in the shadows scoffed. “Never. In fact, they’ve recently given me a raise, thanks to the names I was able to give them.”

“You’re welcome,” said McDonald. “Listen, those drop sites—were they being watched 24/7?”

A shrug.

“Well, if you’re going to be like that.”

“I already gave you more than I should have,” said the man in the shadows.

“And I’m grateful for it,” sighed McDonald. “As always. Despite all the work I’ve got to do now to get it sorted.”

“You’ll pull it off. I have no doubt.”

“Oh, you’re too sweet.” He took another long drag on his cigarette. “Busy day?”

The man in the shadows sighed. “I’ve been told we need a new man,” he said. “Or woman, as the case may be. Someone in… let’s say, in the military way. Within the next few months.”

“That’s all?”

A shadowy nod.

“Hmm,” said McDonald. “Keep me updated, I suppose. How’s the family?”

From the darkness, an elegant hand curved around the glass of gin on the table and brought it up to an unseen mouth to take a languorous sip. There was a glimpse of a blue eye set into a severe brow, flashing in amusement. “I might as well ask you the same thing.”

McDonald gave a cheerful shrug. “Well,” he said, “I tried.”

“You always do.”

McDonald sipped at his pint. “Have your lot been doing the ridiculous all-hands meetings lately? The ‘buck up, we’ll get ‘em’ sort of rallies? There’s something in the air…”

“Oh, Christ, yes,” said his contact. “We had one this Sunday—victory is inevitable, glory to the Party, all that pap, it was interminable. Wish I could have brought a book to read.”

“Exactly!” laughed McDonald. “I’m always thinking of going into Research and seeing if they can’t fit me with some sort of earpiece—let me listen to the Light Programme instead of the Chief, you know.”

“You’re just full of brilliant ideas, aren’t you.”

The conversation then veered off into the wilds: they discussed recommendations for new tailors, as the one they shared had recently retired; the chances for Aberdeen in the Scottish League, and, naturally, the new Tom Bowline film. McDonald thought it wasn’t half as good as the last one; his contact thought it was rather fun—high praise, coming from him. (McDonald held his tongue about Fitzjames’s appearance at headquarters.)

From across the bar, there was a crash and a roar as a drunkard holding a pool cue barreled into a waitress, depositing the contents of her tray onto the grimy floor.

The man in the shadows heaved a dramatic sigh. “Next time, we’re meeting outside.”

***

Finland, sharing a border with the USSR, was at this time a northern nexus of espionage, a battlefield where both sides were engaging in a protracted power struggle. Sort of like tug-of-war, but with more vodka and hushed exchanges in public saunas. The greatest weapons of intelligence the community had in their armory would be used in turn by each side to tug the tide mere inches in either direction.

So far, it seemed that the USSR was winning: Finland’s governmental policy was inching ever-so-slowly towards the east, while the Western contingent struggled to gain a foothold in even the most low-level of diplomatic situations.

It was not out of mere convenience that _Ice Blink_ was filming in Helsinki and its snowy environs. The producer of the Tom Bowline film series, the legendary Robert Celery, had connections to industrialists in the North, including the controllers of shady Soviet-adjacent chemical company Helvetti, which was to provide the location for the film’s climactic action sequence in the form of their fuel refinement plant, forty-five kilometers outside the city proper.

It would have been rather nice if Francis had known this from the start—but he was not briefed until Fitzjames had already winged his way across the North Sea: such was the usual disjointed method of communication between controller and officer. Need to know basis, et cetera.

One of Blanky’s men had turned up the connection, compiling sparse information collected second- and third-hand which all pointed to Celery as a character to watch. The Chief had clearly known this when he had taken Fitzjames into consideration as an agent. This plain and surprisingly sensible fact went a long way towards soothing Francis’s nerves, as the next stage of the operation kicked off.

By the time Francis established contact with Fitzjames in Helsinki, he could’ve almost said he’d come to something resembling a state of acceptance with the situation. His phone rang at two in the morning; when he picked it up, he heard a single breath on the line before there came the click of the line closing, and the dial tone returned. Then, precisely two minutes later, the sequence repeated itself: ring, breath, hang up. Everything was in place.

The jobs set for Fitjzames were myriad. Many of them were vital, some were mere busywork. Francis had mooted the idea that they’d send him decoy jobs: he still didn’t fully believe that the man would be able to keep his lips zipped shut in high-security situations, despite his training, and so populating his to-do list with unimportant diversions would be a way to somewhat counteract any potential suspicion as to what his purpose was, should anyone suspect anything. Potentially, it would also keep him on his toes: Francis could only too easily imagine Fitzjames getting complacent or, worse, distracted by some new and shiny objective—the girl he was sharing scenes with, probably.

Regardless of the individual objective’s importance, Fitzjames would drop reports at pre-established sites in accordance with established protocol, which would then be picked up by a covert man on the ground and transmitted.

The Helsinki field office provided a steady flow of communication from these drops. It was run by a solid Yorkshireman named Bridgens who had done a stint at GCHQ during the war, and was an expert on ciphers and encoding. Really, he ought to have been given his own surveillance desk at MI5, but he was a laid-back sort of fellow (as laid-back as one could be in this business) and preferred the relatively sedate life of a foreign bureau manager to the potentially hectic career of a domestic controller.

Many a late night at the office, Francis would find himself waiting in the secured teletype machine room at headquarters for the transmission to come through. Fitzjames had an unorthodox way of communicating: despite his commitment to his training, he often went off the rails, adding little embellishments to his dispatches, jokes or quirks that made them stand out from the stack.

What had been, up close and in person, the sort of overwhelming too-much-ness about Fitzjames had become, at a distance, something much more tolerable. Reduced to its essence and stripped of its frills in the form of pithy communiques, a manner that Francis had once found intolerably grating was now—however loath he was to admit it—genuinely appealing.

As long as he didn’t actually have to be looking him in that magazine-cover face of his while they spoke, Francis found Fitzjames to be a breath of fresh air in comparison to the interminably dry material transmitted from Hodgson in Zagreb, Little in Berlin, or Irving, who in his first year back after his hiatus had taken a covert job in Paris, and was determined to prove himself as an agent to fill the hole Ross had left with his retirement.

None of their reports carried the same zest: despite the comparative lack of actual intelligence that characterized Fitzjames’s reports, they were nevertheless consistently more interesting than whatever else his other men turned up, and Francis began to savor them like fine meals.

_… and the resolute whiteness of a Helsinki sky surely must have medicinal qualities useful for one in this trade, for I can feel myself growing more perceptive with each passing hour..._

_… perhaps a Soviet, although he may have just been having a bad day, I find the default expressions of a communist and a person with indigestion to be similar…_

_… merely a coincidence, I am sure! The Helvetti representatives on set are universally condescending, acting more as babysitters to us feeble-minded actors than industrial supervisors..._

Four weeks into the assignment, and Francis found himself staring out into the grey and sodden skies of south London and imagining, with very little effort needed, what Fitzjames was doing: drinking coffee in his trailer; getting his hair combed and oiled by old ladies in cat-eye glasses; telling stories to groups of awed Finns about his coterie of celebrity friends.

One morning the _Times_ carried a preview of _Ice Blink,_ including new photographs of Fitzjames and his co-star on set. She was a pretty little brunette, in a shiny shift dress and perfectly sculpted hair. Next to Fitzjames, she looked like a mannequin, or a doll. Francis couldn’t imagine him ever scowling at her, or raising his voice in anger, or tightening his hand into a fist at his side as she spoke. He considered that she was missing out. Then he considered what he had just considered, and began to feel very odd about it.

“You’ve got a look like your dog’s died,” said Blanky, walking past Francis’s desk and coming to an abrupt stop.

Francis shoved the newspaper down on the desk and slid a dossier over it to cover up the photos. “Don’t say that. Neptune is perfectly well.”

“Sorry. No offense meant. It’s just, I know you, and that’s not your usual frown. It’s a special edition. Something going on?”

“You’re imagining things,” said Francis, straightening up. Then, before he could make another move, Blanky’s hand darted out and snatched the poorly-hidden newspaper out from beneath his fingers, revealing the _Ice Blink_ spread in all its glory.

“Are you still smarting about that Fitzjames?” said Blanky. Francis was confused at the use of the word “still” until he remembered that for all anyone knew the last time he’d spoken to Fitzjames had been the day his “research” pass expired, and Operation Premiere had come to an end.

“No,” said Francis quickly.

“I don’t blame you,” said Blanky. “Tall, young, handsome. Didn’t give you the time of day.”

“He’s not tall,” said Francis. “He had two inches on me. Barely.”

Blanky raised an eyebrow.

“And he’s not young. Not _that_ young, I mean.”

Blanky waited, then said, “... And handsome?”

Francis would have had to say something to that—he didn’t know what, he would have come up with _something,_ he was sure—but luckily, he was saved by the appearance of Jopson at his side.

“Yes, Jopson?”

“The courier’s brought this in for you, sir.”

He took the offered dossier and flipped through it, pointedly ignoring Blanky and his chuckles as he absorbed its contents. George Hodgson had sent along more of his telephoto surveillance from the Yugoslav job—pages upon pages of photographs of indistinguishable dark-haired men wearing shady looks.

“Christ,” Francis groaned, “it’s like Hungary all over again.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” said Blanky, peering over Francis’s shoulder. “You did well there.”

“It would be, if anything was actually of use. I don’t know who the hell these men are! Context, George, it’s all about context…”

“He never learns, does he.”

“Oh, and there’s this,” added Jopson, before handing over a sealed memo straight from Sir John’s desk. Francis glanced at the stamp on the outside, and then gave a nod to both his secretary and fellow officer. They took his meaning right away and silently evacuated to parts unknown, to give Francis peace.

According to the memo, there was to be a gathering at the residence of the Polish ambassador’s, a friend of Celery’s; there was every possibility that persons related to Helvetti would be in attendance. Fitzjames’s assignment would be to take photographs using his miniaturized camera: of the attendees and, if possible, documents or other items of interest that he might be able to acquire during the course of the event. Also vital would be his ears: any conversation related to Helvetti’s acquisition of materials; the names of personnel or the schedule of shipments which might be of use to MI6.

It was the most high-profile and, indeed, the least passive assignment Fitzjames had been given to date. Of course, Sir John was sanguine about his prospects; Francis less so. Surely Fitzjames would be distracted by his fellow actors—speaking instead of listening—schmoozing instead of spying!

A phone call was scheduled, and Francis stayed late for it. The office was nearly empty; only the poor sods like Francis with agents elsewhere across the world were left, waiting for word on missions accomplished or gone wrong. Cleaners with high clearance badges clipped to their collars wandered between the desks, tipping bins into bags to be taken to the shredders, wiping crumbs off chairs and coffee stains off desks. Somewhere in a locked room on the third floor, Blanky was at a teletype terminal, expecting news from Belgrade, where his man Hartnell, a trade representative for Brylcreem, was plying his local colleagues for information on KGB activity. And maybe out there in this very city, McDonald was meeting his mysterious contact, in some high-end restaurant or smoggy, crooked back-alley.

Night time was spy time; in darkness the key to every code seemed closer at hand. If only one could just step around the next corner before the harsh light of mundane day returned and the shabbiness of the sorry, striving world was again laid brightly bare, perhaps one could find the truth.

Francis was jerked out of a dozy half-sleep by the sound of his phone ringing, echoing shrilly across the empty floor.

“Hello?”

“Ah! Francis, there you are.”

He’d not given leave for Fitzjames to use his Christian name that he could recall; Francis waited for the urge to snipe at him to rise within, but it never came. “Yes,” he said, “go on.”

The line was insecure, of course. They wouldn’t be able to talk about what they were actually meant to talk about. The report would arrive in two days, maybe three, brought over by one of their couriers, but in the meantime Francis needed confirmation that the film had been successfully deposited.

He was tired. It was late. And Fitzjames, in characteristic fashion, decided to disregard his clear instructions to make the phone call quick and simple, and instead recount the entire saga of the event, beginning with standing in front of his hotel room’s closet, deciding which tie to wear.

Francis found his eyes drooping. Fitzjames’s voice, even crackling over the international line, had a honeyed quality, one that seeped into Francis’s head and settled in there, rising like a soft, warm tide.

But suddenly he came fully awake: he was aware Fitzjames was talking about a confrontation of some sort, something Francis ought to be concerned about.

“And it was really quite absurd,” Fitzjames was saying. “I’d just wandered down the hall, and suddenly a man had his hands on me—next thing you know, I was taken aside by some important-looking people and asked, in all seriousness, if I was a spy.”

“A spy,” repeated Francis, his mouth going dry. “What did you say?”

Fitzjames laughed, as if the whole thing were a tremendous joke.“Why, what do you suppose I said! I said I’d never heard something so ridiculous. I explained to them all the reasons why such a thing was quite impossible.”

Francis could imagine it easily. The astonishment, the affront; Fitzjames’s expressive face and body contorted in a posture of pure offense. The shame written clear across the accuser’s face; the abashed deference lending itself to subsequent immunity on the part of the accused from further questioning—a tour de force.

“They left me alone after that. Truly, a ridiculous encounter.”

“Remarkable,” Francis admitted. He could hear the sheer relief in Fitzjames’s voice; it made the boastful pride more tolerable.

“Not particularly,” said Fitzjames. “Happens to me all the time. People tend to think that just because I play a spy in the movies I must associate with that sort in the real world. Anyway, you’ll be glad to hear that after that little adventure, I was able to find our _mutual friend…_ and he told me all about the _records_ he’d been playing…”

Through coded phrases, Fitzjames went on to confirm his acquisitions from the party: not only photographs of the attendees, but also of some interesting papers on a desk in a room left unlocked that would surely be of high interest to Communications.

When the call ended at last, Francis found that his exhaustion had vanished: all of a sudden, he wanted to _work,_ to be on the ground somewhere, back in the streets, in the field. He felt very far away from his agents—a distance that had been a comfort, since Ross retired, but was now something more like a sore spot, an itch.

He stretched, yawned, grabbed his coat and briefcase and headed for the lift. There he met Blanky, coming from the third floor: they nodded to each other, in understanding silence, as they were carried back down to the ground.

***

Eventually _Ice Blink’s_ production came back to London to film some pickup shots at Pinewood. By then, it was nearly springtime and London was beginning to wake up: its stuporous grayness pulled back slowly like a veil on a bride’s head to reveal young, blue eyes.

It would be the first time Francis had seen Fitzjames since their tiff outside Kings Head. Since then, it had been communication at a distance: monitored transmissions, versus true conversation.

They were to meet in the cafeteria of the British Museum. When Francis scanned the crowded room for Fitzjames, he was disappointed to see that the man was nowhere to be seen. Of course it had been too much to expect that he be on time... Francis felt familiar annoyance unfurling, covering up what he hadn’t realized was genuine anticipation.

But then a man sitting a few tables away, a hunched old man in a dirty flat-cap and wrinkled trench coat, suddenly— _unfolded—_ a transformation in the blink of an eye, until James Fitzjames was standing before Francis, in all his glory. The same magic that had seen him walk unnoticed through the crowded streets near headquarters was at play here, too—the same strange power that made him shine onscreen in the guise of Tom Bowline or any number of romantic leads in his younger years.

For a moment they were both frozen—and then Fitzjames swooped gracefully forward and offered his hand, breaking the strange tautness of the meeting.

Requisite trays of mediocre food were acquired, and they sat eating in mostly silence. At first the atmosphere was prickly as it had been during training, but it soon started to shift. A change had been wrought over many miles, and now Francis was feeling its effects. It was like standing on the deck of a ship rolling in a turbulent sea: one moment the presence of Fitzjames close at hand caused his stomach to roil with unease; the next he’d feel suffused with the singular and satisfying emotion of seeing an agent returned successfully and safely from the field.

He thought, perhaps, there was even a new humility about him, a changed aspect, some of his edges sanded down—but then Fitzjames took a long sip of his soda water, smacked those infuriating lips, and asked, “Have you lost weight?”

“Pardon?”

“You look different.”

Francis shook his head tetchily. “Stopped drinking,” he said.

“Oh.” Fitzjames seemed unsure as to whether he should congratulate or console. Francis used the silence as an opportunity to bring the conversation around to the real purpose of their meeting, and they began to discuss Fitzjames’s time on the ground. Eventually they came to the night of the phone call.

“The incident at the party. Your, er, close call,” Francis said. “That must have been the height of adventure.”

“Well, perhaps,” said Fitzjames. He pushed a bit of meatloaf aimlessly around on his plate without picking it up, and then seemed to decide on something. “But there was plenty I didn’t tell you about… Couldn’t fit it all into the transmissions, you know. Didn’t want to clog up the pipes…” Without further ado, he launched into a tale of how he had snuck outside the sanctioned area of the Helvetti plant to inspect the receiving zone. Francis remembered seeing the photographs he’d taken—but he’d had no idea of the trouble Fitzjames had gone to get them.

“I thought if anyone spotted me, a story about getting lost on the way from my trailer to set would be believed—that place was quite the maze. But somehow I landed outside the fence, and then I was locked out! I ended up walking,” Fitzjames continued excitedly, “down the road, all the way from the plant to the nearest phone booth, taking photographs all the way, so I could call into the field office and have them send a car for me.”

“That’s very dangerous,” said Francis, with a frown. “You know you could have—been run over, you could have frozen to death!” Even as he said it, he found he didn’t really believe it. Death and Fitzjames had nothing in common.

“But it was such a thrill, really! The thought that any moment I might be spotted, or captured, or questioned—and then the moment of relief when I realized I was safe—!” His face was lit up in a way that made him look fifteen years younger. Then he noticed Francis’s eyes on him, and seemed to subside; reassembling himself.

The conversation turned to official business—new drop locations, and appointments for further training, since Sir John’s enthusiasm for Fitzjames’s role had only grown since the initial sessions and subsequent deployment.

“Tell me, Francis,” Fitzjames said, all sudden seriousness. “Did I move the needle?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Fitzjames, “what I was doing in Finland. Did I help anyone?”

It seemed that so much had happened, between Fitzjames’s various assignments, that when it came time to tot up the hits and misses, it all added up to not very much at all. Effectively, they were exactly where they’d been when they’d started. Francis found he didn’t want to admit it to Fitzjames—it wasn’t that his work had been for nothing, no bit of intelligence acquired in the field was wholly worthless, it could bear fruit in months and years to come after lying dormant and discarded, he’d seen it happen many times—but in the main, there had been no concrete accomplishments, at least none that he could explain simply.

It would’ve been easy enough to lie. An encouraging sort of lie, the kind that officers often dealt out to their agents: yes, you’re a hero. _Yes, you’ve saved hundreds of lives—you’ve prevented encroachment on the border—you’ve preserved freedoms—you’ve stopped the rockets from launching—you’ve done it, by God, you’ve done it._ This sort of encouragement was standard. Expected, even: what was a handler for, if not to guide the heart and soul of his man towards the confidence that would lead to success?

But Francis couldn’t bring himself to start doling it out, not now. He had the sense that any dishonesty, even expertly presented with the air of authority, would crumble to pieces under the piercing dark gaze of the man who sat before him, eagerly awaiting his answer.

Instead he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think so. Not yet.”

To avoid viewing Fitzjames’s expertly masked disappointment, Francis pushed back his chair, grabbed his coat and hat, and headed for the cafeteria exit.

Fitzjames was at his heels as they emerged into the lobby. “Why did you choose this spot to meet?” he asked. The massive cavern of the Museum’s interior echoed with the sounds of schoolchildren, tourists, docents.

“It’s one of our usuals,” said Francis. “Centrally located. Full of people. Easy to disappear inside.”

“Oh,” said Fitzjames. “I thought it might be because you fancied a look at the Rosetta Stone.”

Francis fought down a laugh. “Shall we?”

They meandered up a set of wide stairs and through an archway, following the flow of people, before coming to stand before a shining, brightly-lit dais upon which stood one of the Museum’s most treasured acquisitions.

“It’s bigger than I remembered,” Fitzjames said, breaking the silence.

“When was the last time you saw it?”

“Ages ago. During university, maybe. You know, I had a mind to do Egyptology…but I ended up reading Classics, in the end. Something about the Greeks truly appealed. Their culture, their values.”

Francis made a perfunctory, dismissive sound at the back of his throat. He had no interest in more stories of Fitzjames’s university days, tales of privilege and parties and punts.

They moved closer to the Stone. Francis’s hands were shoved in his coat pockets, his chin tucked into his scarf; Fitzjames was craning his neck to see, his long pale neck emerging from his jacket collar in a graceful curve.

“To think, nobody knew what the hell the Egyptians were saying before they dug that thing up,” Fitzjames said, at length.

“That’s intelligence for you,” Francis answered. “You can walk around for ages with the answer to your biggest questions buried right under your feet, and then a spade will hit stone, and centuries of ignorance will evaporate in a second.”

“You’ve thought about this, have you?”

“I hardly think about anything else.”

From the side, against the backdrop of the stelae and statues on the far wall of the exhibition room, Fitzjames’s aquiline profile took on an almost regal aspect. Francis was very aware in that moment of his stature, the way he caught the eye of every other person who passed by, even those who didn’t recognize him for who he was.

“Maybe it would be better if we never knew,” said Francis quietly. “They could have left it buried. We could’ve kept trying to solve those symbols, year after year. Might have kept us occupied.”

“There’s a thought,” said Fitzjames. “The hieroglyphics were thought to hold the secrets to eternal life, turning lead into gold, weren’t they? The language of the gods. But when it came down to it, it was just—” he waved his hand, expansively “—phonetic.”

“A code,” said Francis. “Just like the ones you had to learn.” It was an absurd sort of small talk. Not his usual line at all. But he found he didn’t want to be silent when Fitzjames was near. It wasn’t the same as waiting for his transmission or his telegram. There was a burden of response he’d never felt with any of his agents before.

“Well, there must be value in finding out what is meant, even if it’s not what you hoped. And surely some day, we’ll figure out the Philosopher’s Stone—best not to let the Soviets get to it first, eh?”

A large American family crowded in front of them then, blocking their view, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the artifact, and Francis turned to go. Fitzjames followed him, and they walked out of the hall, down the palatial steps at the entrance to the Museum, and into the broad courtyard. The sun had come out while they’d been inside; the morning’s rain now evaporating from the puddles dotting the pavement.

“It isn’t like I thought it would be,” said Fitzjames, apropos of nothing. His tone was honest and plain. Nothing of the storyteller in it. “No offense meant, of course. It’s vital work. But perhaps I shouldn’t have taken Barrow up on the offer…. left it to the professionals… Silly of me, really.”

Francis found himself searching his mind for something with which to shore up Fitzjames’s confidence—not something he ever expected to have to do with this particular agent, though he’d polished his pep-talk ability to perfection long ago. He’d already sworn not to lie, hadn’t he?

“How any man achieves his role is less important than how he acts it,” he said finally, “and that he measures up.”

Fitzjames stopped walking. Too late, Francis realized the implications of what he’d said, and groaned. “No, listen—” he said preemptively, holding up a hand, but Fitzjames rounded on him, a delighted look on his face.

“You read my interview?” Fitzjames exclaimed. “That was years ago!”

“I was briefed,” said Francis, reddening, staring at his feet. “I had to do my research—”

“Is MI6 paying for back-orders of _Sight & Sound_, now?”

Francis grumbled something about the library, but Fitzjames wasn’t listening. His ebullience had returned in force; the momentary flash of insecurity vanished like mist in the sun. Meanwhile Francis was growing hot inside his coat and scarf; the cause of the afternoon rise in temperature—surely it hadn’t been this warm when he’d entered the museum.

“Wasn’t that the interview where I took the reporter round to the Talk Of The Town?”

“I don’t recall.”

“It was, yes! That was a brilliant night… By the end of it we were so drunk that I’d started interviewing him!”

 _At least I’ve cheered him up,_ Francis found himself thinking. Then he tried to ameliorate that thought with a less charitable addendum: _of course London’s finest narcissist would have his mood lifted by reminder of his own good press—_ but there wasn’t much feeling in it.

***

Jopson was reading a magazine when Francis arrived. The lad’s taste in entertainment was impossible to discern. One day it was race cars, the next day it was coin collecting. Today, the periodical of choice was a volume of _Cat Fancier,_ with a cover sporting a large and rather off-putting photograph of a Siamese kitten. Francis couldn’t figure out if Jopson was engaged in some kind of active subterfuge to prevent his boss finding out what he was actually concerned with, or if he genuinely had that broad of a base of interests.

“Do you even have a cat?” muttered Francis as he sat down.

The phone at Jopson’s desk rang; with glittering efficiency he set the magazine down to pick it up, said, “Jopson here,” then nodded once, twice, said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up. He turned to Franics: “Mr. Collins needs you.”

“Collins?” Francis repeated wonderingly. “He’s on—”

“The sixth story now, sir.”

“Right.”

Francis tried to avoid dealing with counter-intelligence as much as possible. He had never been one for the reactive paranoia that suffused the department. Realistic pessimism based on facts had always served him well enough; he didn’t need to add an additional dosage of fear to the mix.

Collins was a burly man, slightly eccentric in the way many an MI6 officer tended to be, in his own unique way, fond of cable-knit ganseys and steel-toed boots. He had joined up shortly after the war as an idealistic student and risen up through the ranks under Sir John before transferring about eight or nine years back into the counter-intelligence department that he now oversaw.

Francis still remembered him as the boisterous, brawling chap he’d been back in the day; when he saw him infrequently around the new headquarters it was always with a sort of shock at the change: Collins now looked much older than his years; his dark beard was shot through with silver and his eyes bore the signs of many consecutive sleepless nights.

There had been an incident—a diver, sent out to surveil a site along the Danube. But the intelligence the mission was predicated on turned out to have been planted, and the diver never came up again. Collins had taken it hard. Ever since then, he’d been seeing shadows where there were none: he was the sort of CI man who’d come to believe that the Prime Minister himself might be one of Them, and there was very little anyone could say to sway him from his convictions.

When Francis entered, Collins had a folder open on his desk. “Operation Soundstage,” he said, as Francis sat down. “Your man Fitzjames. How is it going?”

“Good,” said Francis, trying not to convey any sort of shock at the news that this project was known outside Sir John’s division. The exact dimensions of CI’s oversight were shrouded in mists of purposeful confusion; the reach of its tentacles obfuscated by bureaucracy and confidentiality. “He’s been performing—quite admirably. Is this to do with him?”

Collins didn’t acknowledge the question. Instead, he stared darkly out of the window, his hands pressed together at his chin.

“What’s this about, Henry?” Francis prompted.

“Fitzjames’s family background. What do you know of it? ”

“Just what was in the briefing,” said Francis, “same as you. And the research I did on my own—everything seemed in order.”

Said research was perhaps more extensive than he’d have liked to admit. The fan magazines, yes, back-ordered and pored over; newspaper articles from library archives, checking the _Radio Times_ for when his old films might be shown, arriving home from the office in time to watch a low-budget production from ten years ago. Fitzjames in black-and-white on his creaky old set dashing through darkened streets—driving down country roads—dancing, with someone in his arms…

Collins wordlessly pushed a photograph over the desk towards Francis. Picking it up, Francis saw a handsome man, mid-thirties, with dark tousled hair and a pale face, almost sickly. A black turtleneck and beret indicated the man’s membership in a certain class of artistic gentleman.

“Do you recognize this man?”

“Can’t say I do, no—”

“William Coningham.”

“... Oh. His brother?”

“Adopted brother,” Collins corrected.

“That’s right. Yes, they’re quite close,” said Francis. Fitzjames spoke of his brother Will often, usually just in passing—but on occasion he’d launch into some tale of their teenage adventures, the Hertfordshire idyll that had been the launchpad for his handsome career. Reminiscence came so easily to Fitzjames; it was easy to envy. If only Francis could look on the past with such simple fondness—but there was only one way for him, and it was ever forward.

Collins’s face grew dark, as though a shutter had been pulled down over some interior light. “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he muttered. With twitching fingers, he fiddled with the cuffs of his jumper, fraying the yarn beyond repair. “... There’s a mole.”

“What?!”

“There is someone operating within Sir John’s department, leaking information to the enemy. An officer or an agent, I can’t be sure—but the information we’ve detected surfacing on the other side all points back in one direction.”

The revelation rattled around Francis’s head, all sharp edges that produced sparks of pain and confusion wherever they hit. Sir John’s department. The four of them, and an untold number of agents and sub-agents run beneath them... 

“It’s not James,” Francis said.

“Why’s that?” challenged Collins.

“It—it just can’t be.”

“He’s an actor, and his people are artistic types—painters, writers. Leftists. This brother of his has recently been spotted in the company of a group of subversives who have been traveling back and forth from Berlin, holding meetings with known sympathetic organizations.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” said Francis. “Even if his brother _was_ somehow associated with—the wrong sorts, Fitzjames would stay well away from it.”

“Can you be sure? You said yourself that they’re close… They could have been radicalized together at school… ”

“The intelligence James has brought back is sound,” Francis said, rapping his hand insistently on Collins’s desk. “I would know—I’ve been running him since the start. There’s been no sign that he’s anything other than totally dedicated to the cause.”

“You don’t _know_ that,” said Collins. “Fitzjames could be taking every little thing he’s learned about you and running it right back to the other side. He plays pretend for a living, after all—you’d never know, would you? If he was feeding you lies?”

“I’d know,” said Francis, with conviction.

“These people—they operate under conditions of moral decay—nothing matters to them except the downfall of everything we hold dear. They’re everywhere. Around us, watching, infiltrating. You can’t find them by looking them in the eyes, or even talking to them… It takes dedicated work to flush them out, and that’s what I’m here to do.” He looked half-crazed. Francis thought at any moment his hair might stand on end, as if he were touching a live wire. “I’ll find the mole,” said Collins. The way he pronounced it made it sound like nothing so much as a threat.

“Perhaps you will,” said Francis, his teeth clenched, “but you won’t find him anywhere near Fitzjames. He’s solid, Henry, solid straight through, I’d stake my life on it.”

“He was in Finland, out of sight, for quite a while. You don’t know who he could have spoken to, who could have been working him the whole time.”

“But he’d never do it _consciously,”_ said Francis, “he wasn’t recruited like one of your native sub-agents, he’s got no loyalties other than to England—”

“They could have something on him."

“Such as?”

“Photographs, you know. Recordings. Might he have gotten in bed with someone?” Collins’s wild eyes darted about before landing back on Francis. “A boy, perhaps? Artists, you know their vices. The blackmail potential is infinite. We do know that’s how _they_ do it, don’t we? The temptation. The pressure. The threats.”

“He’s not—no, he isn’t—” Francis stammered. He couldn’t believe the direction this conversation had taken. “He’s a bachelor, not a—he wouldn’t. Haven’t you seen the papers? He’s got a different girl every week, there’ve been no scandals of that sort—”

“We could have MI5 surveil him,” said Collins, with increasing fervor, “we could have him brought here and interrogated, until he talks—”

Francis gave into a rising urge and slammed his fist down on the desk, sending papers flying. “You will do nothing of the sort!” he bellowed. “Not as long as he remains my agent, and I remain his officer—take it up with Sir John, if you can bear to face him with such an outlandish, unfounded accusation!”

Collins set his jaw and said nothing as Francis stood up, dropping the photo of Coningham down on Collins’s desk with an air of finality, and left the room, storming back to the lift.

His heart was racing, riding the lift back down to his floor. Perhaps he had gone a bit too far. Perhaps now Collins’s suspicion would fall upon Francis himself, for the crime of protesting too much—but he would take that consequence as it came.

As he reached his desk, he felt a fevered urge to call Fitzjames up and tell him what he’d done, in great detail. _If you could have heard me in there—you would’ve been proud, James, I stood up for you—_

Christ, what was wrong with him? Two months ago, he would have been the first to concede that Fitzjames was a liability, a potential weak link in the chain of intelligence; he would have jumped at the chance to discredit him and have him taken off his hands, blacklisted from all intelligence service and perhaps even from the film industry. If he’d never had to see his face on a poster or marquee again it would’ve been worth it.

But James was no traitor.

Of course, Francis’s confidence in that area then introduced an element of uncertainty elsewhere. If James wasn’t the one leaking information to the other side—then who was? As paranoid as Collins was, Francis was well aware he didn’t make up theories out of whole cloth. There had to be reason, somewhere at the bottom of the dark well the man had lost himself down. But no matter how Francis tried, it was easier to imagine anyone else as a traitor. Anyone at all: even Blanky, even McDonald.

Who had said it? Ross, probably, during one of their long nights: in Hungary, in Hobart, in the basement of the building on Broadway. _You know what’s the worst thing about you, Francis? Despite all evidence to the contrary, you’re an optimist._

Francis had probably smiled indulgently, swirled the whisky in his glass around and asked, _Is that so?_

And Ross had answered something like, _Yes. You’re incorrigibly hopeful. It’s why you’re the best of us, at the end of the day._

He hadn’t agreed, at the time. Ross had been a flatterer; they both had been, at that point in their working relationship, going back and forth trying to encourage each other that what they were doing was benefiting someone, somewhere.

But now, he thought he understood. Even in the face of evidence that might have convinced another man, he found himself blindingly hopeful, devastatingly sure, that if it came down to it, he’d stand by James to the end.

“Of all the men in the whole wicked world….”

“Sorry?” Jopson looked up from his desk. He had put the magazine away and was now doing something arcane with filing-folder tabs and colored pens.

“Nothing,” said Francis, passing by. “Just talking to myself.”

***

In a surprise upset, it was Sir John, not McDonald, who was late to the briefing one afternoon. He looked a bit peaky, which to Francis was a bad sign, as his controller had a tendency to get sick whenever an important operation was about to kick off. A sneeze from him was a reliable harbinger of at least a few weeks of late nights and panicked dispatches to and from agents in the field.

Once they were all seated, Sir John placed a photograph in the middle of the table. It was a copy of a passport-office photo, showing a stern-looking man with light hair and a forehead Francis could only describe as “authoritative.”

“Stanley,” he said. “Dr. Stephen Stanley. Born 1914, Hampshire; exempted from service due to medical training. He’s now in private practice in Harley Street, and a fine medical man by all accounts. We’ve received a tip-off from the CIA that he may be in some way associated with the local KGB operation. In what capacity, we’re not sure.”

Blanky took the photo and squinted at it. “Nice coat he’s got.”

“How do they know?” McDonald asked. “He doesn’t look the type at all. And trust me, I know a spy when I see one.”

“Naturally, they’re loath to admit their sources,” Sir John said, “but I had the impression it had to do with a conversation overheard at the Devonshire. They seem very sure.”

“Bloody Americans showing us up on our own territory,” Blanky grumbled.

“They can’t help their competitive spirit, now,” said McDonald, “they’re still angry about 1812. But Sir John—quite honestly, that sounds like an incredibly tenuous link. We know the Americans are trying to prove the superiority of their own surveillance networks—they might be supplying us with mediocre information to make themselves look smart. This could blow up in our faces, if this fellow turns out to be innocent.”

“I see your point, Alex,” said Sir John. “And I said something to that effect, but intelligence from MI5 helped establish the link on our end. As it happens, Stanley has been issuing regular prescriptions to someone we’ve been watching for some time now…”

A second photo. This one, a young woman, blonde, with a pout of a mouth and long-lashed light eyes. “Maja Kalinski. Polish model, of some repute—connected, one might say intimately, to Mr. Robert Celery.”

“The film producer?” said Blanky. “That does all the Bowline pictures?”

“That’s the one,” confirmed Sir John. “There are rumors that she’s campaigning to get cast in the next film.”

“And why do we care about celebrity gossip, may I ask?” said Francis. He’d perked up at “Bowline” but felt sick to his stomach at the thought of yet another pert young thing entering Fitzjames’s scene.

Sir John gave him a meaningful look, and then turned to the other two officers at the table. “Alex, Thomas—I’m going to bring you in on an operation Francis and I have been running these past months…”

He proceeded to lift the veil on Operation Soundstage, detailing how one of the few actionable items of intelligence that Francis had supplied from Fitzjames was one that had helped turn up the link between Kalinski and Celery.

Then came the reveal. The prescription pads, recovered from the pharmacy, were thought to constitute some kind of code; it hadn’t been cracked yet but Communications suspected it pointed to regular meetings being planned. Meanwhile, chatter on tapped lines in her home city of Krakow by ground agents there had supported the conclusion that she was acting in some capacity as a spy. Her father had disappeared recently: formerly a high-level party member, he had not been seen in some months, and the chances that he was now languishing in Siberia were high. Naturally, the thinking was that Kalinski was being coerced: the threat of her father’s life hanging over her head was enough for the KGB to press her into service.

In two weeks, she would be in attendance at a party being thrown by the Finnish cultural attache at his home embassy in London—a celebration for the release of _Ice Blink_ , immediately following the premiere of the film at the Odeon. Fitzjames would also be there. It would be the perfect opportunity for him to work his magic.

“We want to get her to come over?” asked Blanky.

“That’s right. If we can guarantee immunity for her, a residence permit, et cetera, there’s a chance she’ll be able to tell us a great deal. Fitzjames will act as our representative in this matter. He will watch for any potential relevant contact being made between Miss Kalinski and other attendees, with a central goal of obtaining information directly from her.”

“Well, she’s certainly his type,” said McDonald. “If he can get her alone—get her to trust him—Bob’s your uncle.”

“It won’t come to that,” Sir John said confidently. He had a long, outstanding record of disapproval of sex being used in spycraft, despite it being one of the best weapons either side had to offer, deployed nearly as often as ciphers or telephoto lenses. “Francis, what do you say?”

The men in the room were looking to him for final approval of the action plan. More than anything, he wanted to come up with some reason for Fitzjames to be left out of it altogether. But he was the man for the job, dammit. The Chief was probably in ecstasies at how well it was coming together.

“Fine by me,” said Francis.

“Wonderful,” said Sir John, clapping his hands together. “It’s settled, then. Francis, you will brief Fitzjames at your convenience. Let’s get Mr. Goodsir on surveillance, of course…”

Blanky cornered Francis after the meeting, halfway down the corridor, and bundled him into a disused conference room.

“Please, Thomas, don’t—” Francis tried, but it was no use.

“I _knew_ there was something to it,” Blanky said, almost triumphant. “Those magazines—that look on your face—Fitzjames has been squatting in your brain like a bridge troll because you’ve been running him, this whole time!”

 _He’s hardly a troll,_ Francis didn’t say. He did say, “It’s nothing like that. It’s just work—can’t a man be reasonably worried about an operation without it turning into a whole production?”

“I know how intense it can get. God, when it was me and Tom Hartnell, that first time, sending him over the border, I thought I would die of nerves. I had his life in my hands. And he was just a kid, a nobody—Fitzjames is a bloody star! No wonder you’ve been on edge.”

Francis was unable to reject comfort when it was offered, especially from such a good friend, but as much as he welcomed Blanky’s solid, comforting hand on his shoulder, he was still half-tense with the effort it took to keep his tongue in check, to stop himself from spilling his every horrid, writhing worry aloud. He nodded instead, pushing his glasses up on his nose and tugging at his collar.

“But he’s got his job, and he’ll do it. Can you trust that?” Blanky asked.

“I can,” said Francis, “and that’s the problem. If he gets this right—Sir John will be delighted, the Chief too—he’ll be given more to do… More danger. Higher stakes.”

“And what’s wrong with that, then, Francis? He knows what he signed up for. And so did you, for that matter. There’s a reason you’ve remained here, through all the ups and downs, and it’s because you’re capable. You’re good, and so is your man.”

He was right, wasn’t he? Simple job. Easy as pie. Just like the party in Finland all over again—Fitzjames handled that, right? With only the words on his tongue!

His strengths lay in his obtrusive unobtrusiveness, his confidence, his ease of conversation, and his dedication to the cause, which so far had not been pierced by the harrowing dullness of intelligence work.

He wouldn’t have a gun—he had no hand-to-hand training—but of course he wouldn’t need any of those things. It was just a girl. Just a beautiful, innocent girl, needing comfort and rescue; an adventure for Queen and country.

“Yes. You’re right,” said Francis, and Blanky smiled, gave Francis’s shoulder one last encouraging tap, and left, leaving Francis alone, in an empty room that still smelled like new plaster.

***

The two men strolling the Embankment, their hats bowed against the wind coming off the river, could have been any pair of businessmen on a smoke break, or perhaps civil servants taking a recess together from Whitehall to engage in negotiations via the usual channels.

In point of fact, they were both spies. McDonald was trying to figure out how best to bring up a tricky subject to his contact. They’d had close calls before, but nothing like this. He didn’t know how long it might be until the whole thing came crashing down—when it did, it’d be the end for both of them. Mutually assured destruction, and all that. It was always looming off in the distance—had been, ever since they’d met, and started up this odd little arrangement—but he thought he’d had more time. He wanted more time.

Stephen Stanley—well. That wasn’t his real name, obviously, but it was what he was called; he’d told McDonald his name from before, once, while they were both spitting drunk, and McDonald had done his best to immediately forget it, as an unspoken favor. He was terrifying, objectively; he was the enemy, realistically; yet in his way, he was more human than most of the men filling the halls of headquarters. He had seen the worst of it during the war: since then the ideological fervor of his youth had by now diminished to a low background hum, eclipsed for the most part by a vested interest in nothing much happening at all—an interest shared, for a good few years now, with McDonald.

Finally, McDonald came out with it. “They have a line on you,” he said. His tone was uncharacteristically serious; none of his usual burbling levity.

Stanley blanched. “Someone from Lvov?” he asked grimly, without a hint of surprise.

“No—it’s nothing like that. Don’t worry. Nothing concrete. Your cover is safe, I promise. They don’t think you’re anything other than an Englishman who’s gotten mixed up in something bad... Just a coincidence.”

“It’s always just a coincidence, in this business. Christ.” Stanley rubbed an eye with the heel of his palm. “I’ve got Georgina off to Benenden in the fall—I’ve got medical conferences, patients with long-term care plans—I can’t possibly deal with having to go back. I’ve only just found the one cobbler in the City who knows how to _properly_ deal with Ferragamos.”

He did so love his shoes. You couldn’t get them in Lvov, that much was sure. You couldn’t get most of the man’s favorite things on the other side of the Curtain, just as you could rarely find his brand of implacable, granite surety anywhere west of Vienna. It was refreshing. McDonald was only realizing now, in the face of this threat, how much he’d come to depend upon it.

“I’ll clear you,” said McDonald quickly. “Before they even have a chance to assign you dedicated surveillance—you know how long these things take to churn through the upper reaches of headquarters.”

They had stopped walking. Stanley rested his elegant hands on the concrete barrier of the Embankment and stared out at the river. McDonald waited patiently as he brooded.

Finally, Stanley asked, “What do you want in return?”

“Now, what makes you think I want something?”

“Not _you._ I know you don’t—you wouldn’t—I mean, your people.”

McDonald thumbed at his cigarette case in his coat pocket, but didn’t remove it. The metal, cool and solid under his fingertips, was a reassurance.

“Well… you know James Fitzjames, yes?”

“The actor? Tom Bowline?” Stanley frowned in bewilderment. “What has he got to do with anything?”

“The very one. They’ve been running him for some months now, through my department. He’s going to be sent in—to the party, after the premiere. The Embassy.”

“Kalinski,” said Stanley, comprehension dawning. McDonald nodded. “My new man is going to be handing off to her that night,” Stanley went on. “He’s with the Admiralty. It was a terrific coup. If I cancelled it now, it would look very suspicious.”

“I know,” said McDonald. “You don’t have to call it off—that’s not what I’m asking.”

“Then what are you asking?”

“Just keep him safe. Don’t let anything untoward happen to him. He’ll be stumbling about like a giraffe, likely; it wouldn’t do for him to trip and fall. If you catch my meaning.”

“I’m not even meant to be there,” objected Stanley.

“Stephen,” said McDonald plaintively.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know. Like _that.”_

“There’s no need to pretend it’s on my account,” said McDonald. “I know you love those ridiculous films, and surely you’d not want to see Mr. Bowline mangled on account of some happenstance incident of international espionage, eh?”

“There are many factors influencing my decision,” said Stanley primly.

“So that’s a yes?”

Stanley’s mouth twitched. He let out a short, huffy exhale and said, “I’ll do my best.”

“Wonderful,” said McDonald. “I knew you’d come through. Now—shall we do lunch?”

Stanley checked his watch—an Arnold & Son, polished to perfection—and said, “You’re due back at the office.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“Certainly not,” said Stanley, “in fact, the opposite. I just worry you’ll be missed. That’s all.”

“How considerate.”

“Just being logical. It wouldn’t do if both of us were under suspicion.”

“No, I suppose it wouldn’t.”

They parted there; McDonald to find a cab back to headquarters, and Stanley off to wherever he went, when they were not together. McDonald preferred not to think about it.

***

The cars were lined up outside the Finnish Embassy: shiny, black creatures disgorging their glamorous passengers two or three at a time onto the red carpet, reflecting the bright white flashes of press cameras going off like little bombs. The women had perfectly curled hair and the men wore finely cut black suits with starched bow-ties.

Across the street, in a disused flat that smelled distinctly of mouse droppings, Mr. Goodsir was fine-tuning the listening equipment, checking and re-checking the transmission status of each bug that had been planted inside the rooms of the embassy. Some months ago, one of the MI6-recruited cleaners had done the initial placing and connection, but as usual the job had been hastily and perhaps inadequately done. Going off past experience, Francis knew he could expect anything from occasional glitches to a complete frequency failure.

And then Fitzjames would be on his own.

“I do hope he’ll be alright,” said Goodsir, peering through the bedraggled curtains at the building across the way. The sun had set completely now; the windows of the three stories of the Embassy were lit from the inside, golden lamps and crystal chandeliers. Another world.

“Of course he will be,” said Francis. “Finland went well, didn’t it? You saw the dispatches coming in. He’s very professional.”

“Yes,” said Goodsir, “but that was different.” Behind his glasses, his round eyes shone with concern. The man’s initial starstruck aspect where Fitzjames was concerned had far from faded over the course of training—if anything it had ballooned, to such proportions as to become unwieldy. Francis had heard from Jopson that the other Research lads were now having to deal with Goodsir’s newfound passion for off-the-wall technological solutions, clearly inspired by his recent dealings with Tom Bowline himself. Jopson had mentioned a sudden dedication to the concept of a camera controlled by the tongue, the invention and testing processes of which was keeping Goodsir occupied far beyond his usual work hours.

“It’s hardly different,” Francis said, in his most reassuring tone. “All he has to do is get Miss Kalinski comfortable enough to open up, and offer her sanctuary in exchange for information.”

“How is he meant to do that?” It was an innocent enough question, asked with Goodsir’s brand of genuine curiosity, but it set Francis to brooding all over again.

When Francis had met Fitzjames at the Holborn for their briefing the previous afternoon, the man had taken one look at the photographs of Stanley and Kalinski atop his dossier and, without Francis having to tell him, seemed to infer that this was a whole different world than the comfortable routine of ground-work he’d gotten used to in Finland.

Few inessential words had been exchanged; Francis felt like a hypocrite at the thought of supplying anything other than realism, not after he’d committed to months of being a distant and prickly taskmaster. Besides, the last time Francis had tried to deliver a confidence boost, on the steps of the British Museum, he’d just ended up embarrassing himself.

So the details of the job had been laid out in plain language, and James had taken it in stride, treating the matter with grave attention, which Francis couldn’t bring himself to be surprised by, or even suspicious of.

“Oh, look, look, there he is!”

Francis swiveled his binoculars to look. At the pavement, where the red carpet began, Fitzjames was emerging from an enormous Rolls, accompanied by his bounding friend Dundy Le Vesconte, who failed to turn even half as many heads as Fitzjames, but wore a tireless smile nonetheless.

They entered the building and Francis, his headphones tuned into the bug in the lobby, heard the cheers and the applause, the exuberant greetings, as Fitzjames moved amongst his friends and peers.

From there, the party seemed to drag on and on. Through the many windows, Francis caught flashes of light on diamond jewelry, silver cufflinks, glossy hair, the folds of colorful dresses.

Francis kept it up: cycling through the frequencies, listening for anything that indicated relevant conversation. It was all intolerably boring. Discussion of the film, other films, television. Every time the booming voice of Robert Celery mentioned his friends at Helvetti, Francis perked up, thinking he would hear about some secret deal or underhanded connection—but no, it was just more boasting, more gushing compliments, toasts to themselves.

He almost fell asleep. Goodsir did, in fact, drop off, his head falling on his shoulder in a pose Francis couldn’t help but find rather darling. He decided to let the fellow rest; Goodsir had been up all night working on setting up the monitoring station.

Finally, through his binoculars, Francis chanced to spot Maja Kalinksi enter a room on the first floor and sit, perched on the edge of a neatly made bed, examining her polished nails as she waited.

Waited for Fitzjames, Francis could presume—had they made arrangements downstairs, for him to follow her up? It would be a tidy move, if so.

She opened the French doors that led onto the balcony, as if to muffle the sound from any listening device—but the bug had been planted in the closet, and the mild ambiance of the street outside did not stifle the transmission too badly.

Then she drew closed the curtains, so that he couldn’t see inside the room, and Francis cursed under his breath.

He heard the door creak open, and waited to see Fitzjames’s recognizable shadow move beyond the billowing white curtains—but then the new arrival spoke.

“Sorry,” he said, “I was looking for the toilet.”

It was a voice Francis didn’t recognize—young, male, London accent. Priggish, indefinably rude: the type of voice belonging to someone you wouldn’t want to end up next to on public transport.

“Hello,” she said. “I find London to be just like the sea, do you?”

Francis knew a code phrase when he heard one. He waited for the strange man to answer. He seemed to hesitate, but finally said, haltingly: “And I find the river to be like Paris.”

“So it’s you!”

“Yes, it is.”

“A pleasure.”

“Sure, miss.” The man seemed inordinately pleased.

“Do you have it?”

Francis’s suspicions, raised upon hearing the code-phrases, were confirmed. This was an exchange! And Kalinski’s interlocutor had to be in possession of something valuable, something time-sensitive, otherwise why risk a handoff at such a high-profile event?

“Yes, I’ve got it,” said the unknown man, but before he could do whatever it was that he came there to do, there came yet another knock on the door, and Kalinski was shushing him intently.

“Miss Kalinski? It’s James.”

Kalinski swore in Polish.

“Tell him to go away!” said her contact.

“I will not! Don’t you know—that’s _James Fitzjames—_ ”

“Well—get him in and out, will you? I’m on a schedule here.” The man’s voice was suddenly panicked, childish, even.

“You need to hide!” Kalinski demanded.

“What? Where!?”

“Oh, how should I know! The toilet—?”

“No, I don’t—”

“The closet!”

“Christ, are you serious—”

“Get in, you idiot!”

The sounds of fabric rustling and a door squealing on its hinges was heard, loudly: she was shoving him into the closet where the bug was! Francis’s heart rate picked up.

“Come in!” called Kalinski.

“Oh! There you are, Miss Kalinski, I’ve been looking all over the place for you.” It was Fitzjames. So far, so good—except for the fact of an unknown malefactor hiding in the closet, and Francis with no way to alert Fitzjames. He could do nothing except watch, and listen, and wait, and hope.

Kalinski said, “Mr. Fitzjames. I am much admired of your work.”

“You’re very kind.”

“In truth I was hoping tonight would be when I met you. I have many questions for you…”

“I could say the same thing,” said Fitzjames. “Your name is on everybody’s lips tonight.”

“You flatter me,” said Kalinski. “Come, let us look at the city.”

They emerged through the curtains onto the balcony, reducing their talk to inaudible rumbles in his headphones. Francis cursed; Goodsir stirred in his chair, and Francis considered waking him, but it wasn’t as if there was anything he could do, or anything he ought to. The balcony should have been bugged; but it hadn’t been; overlooked like so many a detail in this type of setup.

Francis put his binoculars down. He didn’t want to witness this at close range. From a distance it was easier to imagine it was someone else doing the job—one of his other agents—someone he cared deeply about, yes, but perhaps not deeply _for._ A favored tool; a respected subordinate; a loyal employee—a fellow soldier in this cold and endless war.

He watched Fitzjames and Kalinski inch closer together, distant figures under some mutual gravitational pull, and realized that Fitzjames was none of those things to him anymore.

It should have been a source of pride. Here was an agent in his element: glamor and seduction and valiant rescue, all grounded in the holy cause of freedom. But all Francis felt was discomfort: he hurt, in a place he couldn’t identify or name; his lip curled disdainfully with nobody to note it.

He kept checking his watch. Was she the one trying to stall for time, or was Fitzjames the one putting it off? If Fitzjames didn’t hurry up and seal the deal soon…

In Francis’s headphones, he heard the man in the closet begin to mutter. “I come all the way here, for my first handoff just to be shown up by the bloody star of the show. Hasn’t he got other wannabes to be necking with? Polish bitch. She probably doesn’t even know what I’ve got here. Otherwise she’d be drooling for it. She’d be banging down this door for it… Christ, my leg hurts. What are they doing out there? Can’t see a thing. I hope it’s worth it. If Mr. Hickey were here, she wouldn’t dare. If I’ve got to listen to them fuck before I can finish this damn job, I swear to God…”

Kalinski had turned around; her lower back against the railing of the balcony. Fitzjames was facing her—his head moving to her ear, as if to whisper into it.

And then he looked up—gazing across the street—saw Francis, peering out through the window. Their eyes met and locked, as Kalinski pressed herself against Fitzjames now in earnest.

 _Why doesn’t he go for it?_ Francis thought. _If that’s what it’ll take—he knows what he has to do!_

Then, loudly, as if right into Francis’s ear, that grating voice: “Hang on. What the hell is this? Oh, fucking—”

A loud percussive noise, followed by piercing feedback, as the bug was yanked forcibly out of its socket. Francis tore the headphones off, flinging them down to the floor with a thump that had Goodsir blinking awake—the feedback was still screaming through them, until Goodsir scrambled for a switch on the equipment and silenced it.

“Get on the radio to headquarters,” Francis told him, “tell them we need extraction, immediately—the situation has been compromised—!”

As Goodsir began transmitting urgently, Francis picked up his binoculars again just in time to watch the billowing curtains in front of the French doors part to reveal the mystery man, standing on the threshold of the balcony.

His face was blocked by Kalinski but Francis saw, in his outstretched hand, that he was holding a gun.

There was a struggle—they were moving about. Francis couldn’t tell what was going on. He abandoned the binoculars, pressing himself to the glass as if he could cross the distance with a thought. But he was stuck, watching, helpless: was the man putting the gun down? “Get it away from him!” he growled through gritted teeth, if only Fitzjames could _hear_ him—

The flash of the gun’s muzzle reached his eyes a millisecond before the crack of the shot rang out—a scream, Kalinski’s, maybe, horribly audible through the glass—and Fitzjames was staggering backwards, hitting the low railing, falling over the balcony—

Francis shouted, “James!”

***

“James,” Francis said, quietly.

“Where am I?”

“MI6 medical building in Chelsea,” Francis said. “A private room—no, no. Don’t sit up—here.”

He handed James the glass of water from his bedside table, and helped him sip slowly from it. When he’d set it back down, he asked, “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been shot, actually.”

“You also fell off a balcony,” noted Francis.

“That’s right,” said James. “Explains the—yes, the broken leg.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

A silent moment: only the clock gently ticking on the wall, and every so often the soft sounds of nurses’ footsteps padding in the corridor outside. It was very late—so late that it was early in the morning; the sun would be up soon, but for now they sat in an indigo dimness fractured only by the bedside lamp; almost as if they were underwater.

“I followed Kalinski when she went upstairs,” James said slowly, “like we discussed. But I was waylaid by Celery: he funds the whole affair, you understand, I couldn’t have just ignored him. I managed to shake him off, though, and when I came in, she was alone. I thought, good, great, full speed ahead. I had this idea that it wouldn’t take very much work at all for me to get her to tell all. She brought me out on the balcony. We got to talking. She was being quite coy—I thought she was scared, perhaps. Of what they would do to her if she tried to get out. I tried to provide that—that confidence, for her. I needed her to trust me.”

He closed his eyes: wincing in pain, or at the memory? Francis waited for him to speak again.

“It was clear enough what she wanted. And of course I’d known it could go that way. But I…” He trailed off. He seemed reluctant to continue with his story—not something he’d ever been before, in Francis’s memory.

“When the man appeared,” Francis prompted, skipping ahead. “With the gun. Did you recognize him? I could barely see him, from my vantage.”

James shook his head. “No. I’d know him if I saw him again,” he said, “but I have no idea who he was. Little rat bastard. Black hair, short, awful attempt at a mustache.”

“He was an agent. KGB, most likely.”

“Yes, that much I gathered, thank you.” James sighed.

“But—what _happened_?”

It had been hours—long, stressful, grim hours of getting everything sorted with the press, and with Sir John, and with the bizarrely cheerful Finns, who were acting like secret agents shot up their private Embassy rooms every day—and Francis was still unsure of what precisely had occurred on that distant balcony, and what had caused the sequence of events that ended with James bleeding and unconscious on the lawn below.

“He was ranting and raving,” James said, “names I didn’t recognize, something about a book, and I thought he was threatening _her,_ because why would he be threatening _me?_ And I ought to have protected her. You know, like a real hero.” He let out a dry laugh. “That’s what I was thinking. _Get in front of her, James._ But I—” He shook his head. “Before I could move, she ran to his side. And that’s when she started on her own tirade.”

“... What?”

“What I gathered,” James said, “is that she doesn’t give a single whit about her father, and that she is in fact a dedicated supporter of the Party, and the one who’d turned him in in the first place. She seems rather a determined creature—trying to ascend the ladder of cinema so that she might be in a position to offer more and better information to the other side. Though I do think she was trying to get the gun away from him—she said he was acting a fool—and he was about to give over, when it went off by accident.”

Francis let this sink in. “So we had her all wrong,” he said at length.

“Yes, it seems so.”

“Seems to be a theme of the evening,” Francis said with a sigh. “That doctor who we suspected of being one of theirs—he was there at the Embassy, a guest of Kalinski’s. First on the scene, after you fell—gave first aid, stopped the bleeding. He might have saved your life.”

“I remember…” said James, squinting as he recalled. “Yes, I recognized him. Just before it all went dark. Looming above me. Quite the loomer, that man.”

“So, as it turns out, he’s _not_ secretly a deep-cover KGB agent, or in the employ of one.”

“He still might be.”

“I suppose so,” said Francis, “but we can’t exactly go after him now, after he saved your life. And besides, McDonald did some work on those prescription pads I told you about: found that the codes had been added after Stanley filled them out. It must be someone further down the chain; the Americans were mistaken after all.” He was babbling. Talking business, trying to make everything seem normal, taken care of, nothing to worry about. “Overall, quite the eventful evening.”

“It’ll be the most tremendous story to tell, won’t it?”

“Well... no,” said Francis, “seeing as it is all highly confidential, and no one can know the full extent of it except the people in this room…”

“Oh. Right.” James seemed to diminish somewhat at the thought.

Francis said quickly, “You handled it all admirably, James.”

James turned away, staring at the wall. He was like a painting, Francis thought: the soft lighting above his bed turned his face into something half-abstract, all lines and planes, a work of art in which one could find whatever one wanted—it didn’t signify a thing, what Francis thought he could see there.

“I didn’t, though.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself—”

“I was off my game from the minute I stepped into the room, and it only got worse. And just when it all went wrong, just when I needed most to move… I froze up.”

Frustration rose in Francis. Why was he being such a bloody martyr about it? Christ, he had gone above and beyond by anyone’s standards. The KGB man had been a total wildcard—there was no way anyone could’ve predicted that there’d be another spy with a gun hiding in the cupboard, let alone one so unhinged, and it was a miracle James hadn’t made it out with worse injuries than he had.

Well, if he was determined to be dramatic about it, Francis should meet him halfway. He’d been through the emotional wringer and back again over the last six hours on account of this man; he deserved to make use of any outlet James was offering, didn’t he? He should snap back: _why couldn’t you? Did your confidence finally give out from overuse?_

But baiting James into rising to anger, here, now—with a bullet hole in his side, cracked ribs and a fractured tibia—well. He couldn’t do it.

Instead, he said as calmly as he could: “Why?”

James said, “Because you were listening. And then I saw you—you were watching.”

“How should it make a difference, if I was watching? Of course I’m keeping an eye on you. Being watched has never been a problem for you, James, you’re in the movies.”

James laughed, then winced at the pain in his ribs. “It’s different,” he said.

“How?” Francis insisted. He was desperate to understand—he felt himself standing on the precipice of some impossible peak. The sun was now beginning to rise outside; the faintest fingers of pink light were reaching in through the blinds. Soon, the whole room would be awash in the dawn, but for now, the darkness still permeated every corner, on the verge of its final dissipation.

“It’s different,” repeated James, “because it’s you. God dammit, it’s _you,_ can’t you see, you infuriating man?”

“Me—?”

“Yes. Yes, of course!”

“I—” Francis shook his head. He was smiling, but it was a nervous, reflexive sort of smile—nothing of joy in it. “It’s the medication talking. I don’t think you quite know what you’re saying. You’ve suffered a great shock—”

“You don’t have to like it,” said James, “and you can do what you want with it, after you have it—but it’s true.” He turned back to stare at Francis, lucid and resigned; a single tear raking his cheek with its fall.

“Oh, James,” said Francis, uselessly. He began to reach out—but his hand stilled before it landed on James’s chest, instead coming to rest on the edge of his cot.

“Well. Now that it’s clear I’m not made out for this whole spying business—”

“—oh, come, now—”

“—and, damn you, but I know you can keep a secret—I suppose I should tell you. I’m not…I’m who you think I am. My father… My father was—”

“I know.”

“... What?”

“I’m an intelligence officer. You’re my agent. Do you really think the department would have let me give you clearance to operate on the ground without a comprehensive background check? The circumstances of your birth might not be known to the adoring public, but they’re certainly known to MI6.”

“Oh. Well.”

“Did you have a speech planned? …I’m sorry, I ought to have let you—”

“No—no, Francis, it’s all right. I… I suppose I’m relieved.” He seemed to be telling the truth; he relaxed, minutely, his mouth falling slightly open in a sigh.

“Is that what this is all about?” Francis asked. “Your—background?”

“So my psychoanalyst tells me,” said James. “Hiding in plain sight. On stage, behind scripts. When the opportunity arose I thought—this is what I’ve been chasing, this whole time. To accomplish something as myself. Not the words on a page, not my face on a poster, but _me._ But when I saw you—and you saw right through me—I knew no matter what I did I’d just be play-acting. I thought I might hate you for it—I was determined to. You remember, how we fought… I couldn’t. I just kept wanting to win you over. It might have made me a better spy, but as a man, it was unbearable, to tell you the truth.”

At some point, while James had been speaking, Francis had found the courage to take his hand. He held it tightly, palm-to-palm, their fingers interlaced. The room was filling with gold and rose now; the dawn picking out filaments of silvery-blonde hair on the back of Francis’s hand; alighting on the folds of James’s green hospital pyjamas.

“I thought I was going mad,” said Francis, truthfully. “I thought you were made up in a lab somewhere specifically to drive me round the bend.”

“You sound like one of my reviewers. Come now—tell me how you really feel.” It was not a request but a demand; Francis was helpless to resist. Hesitant as a doe, he reached out with his free hand to smooth James’s hair back from where it lay limp on his forehead. James pressed himself up ever-so-slightly into the touch; a shiver went down Francis’s spine.

“I know the whole country adores you—the whole world—and I have no claim whatsoever,” said Francis, his voice threatening to fracture, “but I can’t help but imagine what it would be like for you to be mine, and mine alone.”

“Francis—”

James struggled to sit up, reaching out for Francis for help, but Francis would have none of it. “Shh, there,” he said, guiding him back down. “You mustn’t exert yourself.”

He leaned down to press his forehead against James’s; their hands still clasped together. They stayed there a while, just breathing. Soft and slow.

When Francis sat up again, he felt the unfamiliar expression he was wearing must be the match of the one James had on: an incredulous bemusement, suffused with delight.

Gleeful disbelief, too, was bubbling up, fizzing like soda water, and he exclaimed: “But good God, all those girls, James, and what for?”

“What do you think? Cover story,” said James. “A distraction, a puzzle for the public to solve. You couldn’t run me as covert; but I’d already been undercover this whole time.”

“You had me fooled.”

“That’s the point, I believe.” Another laugh, another cough and a wince—Francis had the glass of water ready for him, and when James was done with it, he looked sated, satisfied in a way Francis had never seen him. That certain hunger, the sharp, faceted leanness of James that had characterized him so simply, had fractured and melted like spring ice, leaving cool, clear seas below.

Had anyone ever taken care of him like this before? Christ, did Francis want to be the first—he would mop his brow and change his bandages, he would read to him and help him dress and make him breakfast even if he objected— _especially_ if he objected.

“Were you serious?” Francis asked. “About not being cut out for this. Because I must disagree—”

“Of course you must,” said James, “but I think I’ve had enough.” He sighed. “It was a valiant effort but, I think, selfish at its core—you were right, when you said vanity was my reason. And I receive quite enough reward for my vanity in the British press, thank you very much. So we shall have to find another avenue for our interactions.”

“Such as?

James eyed him—a sultry, shameless look. “I could set us up, somewhere in the country. I’m very wealthy, you know. My paycheck for _Ice Blink_ was about two times the last one, did you know?”

Francis sputtered. It really _had_ to be the medicine talking, at this point—what on Earth was in that IV? “I can’t just run off with you! I have men in the field, they need me—!”

“Surely there are dozens of young, upstanding officers ready to take your place. Aren’t you nearing retirement age anyway?”

Francis resisted the urge to cuff James’s ear for that remark—sublimating the impulse into slowly bringing their joined hands upwards, pressing his mouth silently to James’s knuckles, smiling against the skin.

James was still in pain—he winced, involuntarily, as Francis gently replaced his hand upon his chest—but there was no sign of hurt now in his eyes, which glowed like coals, hot and wanting.

“Very well,” said Francis. “I accept your provisional resignation. But you’ll have to be kept on the payroll regardless.”

“Whatever for?”

“The Chief prefers sex to be kept inside the department, if at all possible. As a preventative measure, you understand—Sir John married his secretary. I’m not sure of the location in our new building, but the supply closet on the second floor of our old headquarters is where consummation usually occurred… in my experience.”

“You are a dirty old man!” James exclaimed. “I knew it! I knew it the minute I saw you.”

“Excuse me—”

“You have stories to compete with mine, I am positive—I demand to hear all of them.”

Francis felt his face coloring. “I really don’t,” he said, but James was now guiding Francis’s hand down inexorably towards his waist, and then further; Francis pulled away, though reluctantly, protesting, “You’ve got broken bones, James!”

“Not forever.”

“No. I suppose not.” Blast the man, he was batting his eyelashes. His award-winning, movie-poster eyelashes. “A kiss, then? You wouldn’t deny a man on his sickbed of a simple pleasure. You’re not so cruel as all that.”

“Oh—James. It’s dangerous. You know it is...”

“So is spying. But worth it, on both counts, I think.”

“Don’t be so sure,” said Francis, but he was already leaning in, kissing James, reveling in the eagerness with which he was met. James’s hand was in Francis’s hair, tugging until Francis gasped into James’s mouth; his lips seemed to want to possess Francis’s, which Francis could not possibly object to.

The emotional and physical revelations of the morning had surely exhausted them both in equal measures, but James was the weaker in body, currently, and so soon after they drew apart he dropped off into a deep sleep, lying against his pillow with his well-kissed mouth charmingly slack.

This relieved Francis greatly; he was sure that if James had remained awake any longer he wouldn’t have been able to resist doing something truly absurd, broken bones be damned.

Eventually he would tell James everything—all the details he’d left out. Such as how the naming by the mystery agent of a “Mr. Hickey” had caught the attention of Sir John when Francis had mentioned it offhand; next thing he knew the whole affair had been taken up the ladder to the Chief, who was putting all hands to it, and now Francis had reason to believe the next few months might be the most dangerous he’d faced as an officer since the war.

There was something afoot on the Continent, some strange red string drawn from Hodgson’s Croatian reports to Little’s observations from Berlin; and around the exact time James had been shot, Irving had failed to appear at his regular rendezvous in Paris. All of it was suddenly coming together, spelling nothing good for his men in the field.

Perhaps James would end up involved somehow, despite his protests. If Sir John and the Chief thought that he was the man they needed… well. You never really left the business, Francis knew. Even Ross might be tempted back into the game one day, if something were to happen to one of his old friends.

But that was all for the future: for now Francis was content to sit at James’s side in the morning light, watching him rest quietly, beautiful and—most importantly—alive.

If all spies were like him, Francis thought to himself, they would be living in Paradise.

Instead, they were living in England—a distant second place, perhaps; but close enough for now.

***

_BOWLINE STAR INVOLVED IN ACCIDENT AT FINNISH EMBASSY_

_Actor James Fitzjames, known across the world as Tom Bowline in Celery Productions’ series of highly successful films, was involved in a mishap at the Finnish Embassy in Central London this past Friday evening. Reports are conflicting: some say a shot was fired, potentially in an attempt on Fitzjames’s life by a crazed fan. Others say he was pushed over a balcony in the midst of a personal argument, involving an unidentified woman._

_In a statement via his publicist, Fitzjames stated that “it was about time something got me into the headlines other than my latest fling. I have a chance accident to owe for this diversification in my press portfolio. Thanks to the fine medical care I’m currently receiving, I’ll be more than recovered in time for my performance in Twelfth Night with the Royal Shakespeare Company this coming fall. I hope to see you there.”_

_A doctor in attendance was on the scene immediately to deliver life-saving treatment. He wished to remain unnamed, but witnesses report that it was his quick action that saved the life of Mr. Fitzjames…_

When he felt someone settle on the park bench beside him, McDonald folded up the newspaper and put it back inside his coat. He crossed his legs and stared out at the water, watching the ducks bob and duck, competitively snapping up the crumbs and crusts being tossed their way by passersby. “I’m sorry about the handoff,” he said.

“Don’t be,” said Stanley. “It would have gone south regardless of Fitzjames. He was just an unhappy casualty. Charles—my man, I mean. He was far more enthusiastic than I’d bargained for. Had been waiting all his life for a night like that. I’ve no idea where he picked up the gun, to be honest... We certainly didn’t give it to him.”

“A little enthusiasm surely never hurt anyone.”

“Except for one of the country’s most prominent film stars...”

“Touché.”

“Quite honestly, if I’d known he was so gung-ho, I wouldn’t have bothered going to all that trouble acquiring those photographs of him doing _that_ with the prostitute.”

“Ah. Nothing like a spot of blackmail in the summertime, eh?”

“Indeed. But less satisfying once you realize he probably would’ve joined up for a packet of crisps, or perhaps even just a stern look.”

McDonald chuckled. “I do forget sometimes that you’re actually quite scary.”

“Anyway,” Stanley said, the glare audible in his voice, “the handoff didn’t happen, I’ve got a loose-cannon agent who I now must rein in, _and_ I got film-star blood all over my best dress shirt. It’s hopeless, basically.”

“I was going to say it was business as usual,” said McDonald, “but I suppose it depends on the man.”

Stanley cleared his throat, and said, in a slightly less strident tone, “Am I… safe?”

“Oh, yes. My lot have been duly shamed. They’ll not look your way for a long time now.”

He chanced a glance to his left; there Stanley was, looking back, the merest hint of gratitude in his eyes all McDonald needed to let him know his efforts were appreciated.

They didn’t have much else to discuss, it seemed, but they had no desire to move on, quite yet, either. McDonald took out his newspaper again and flipped through it page by page. Finally he folded it to a particular column, and handed it across the bench to Stanley.

“They’re showing _Ice Blink_ in twenty minutes,” he said.

“Really.”

 _“Bowline’s Most Action-Packed Adventure Yet!_ Look. It says so, right here.”

“Hm. I can see that.”

“I’ll get us popcorn...”

“Well. In that case.”

Together they left the park, heading towards Leicester Square. Stanley in his pale peacoat and McDonald in his dark suit: two pawns on the broad checked board of London. Moving in a slow parallel dance from square to square—avoiding the lumbering machinations of the crowned pieces—and still managing to find plenty of room to maneuver.

***

“Why do you do this?” asked Tansy Malherbe. They were high up above the tundra, with the Northern Lights shimmering on the horizon. The crane swayed dangerously, but her companion did not seem to be scared at all, which made her feel brave in turn. “It’s dangerous. It’s terrifying. You might be killed at any time. Kidnapped, tortured! A terrible game to play.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Tom Bowline, turning to her with a confident smile as he prepared to zip-line across the ice to land on the long, low roof of the heavily guarded compound below. “But you really do meet the most _amazing_ people.”

He winked at Tansy; and then he was gone, disappearing down into the blue darkness, leaving only the wind in his wake.

_[FIN 🎵](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01lFZthUVBc) _

**Author's Note:**

> along with a heavy helping of John Le Carré and Graham Greene, I relied a great deal on Gordon Corera’s highly informative _The Art Of Betrayal._ the rest of the vibes were supplied by 1960s James Bond films (RIP Sean Connery 😭) and, of course, _Good Omens._ a little bit of _Singin’ In The Rain_ snuck in there as well...
> 
> [here is a moodboard i made](https://i.imgur.com/F2Y32PW.png), for your pleasure 
> 
> i'm on [tumblr](http://areyougonnabe.tumblr.com) and [twitter!](http://twitter.com/areyougonnabe)


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